Mehdi Kimakhe

I own the Data & AI competency: the team, the certification path, and the target architectures that go into client proposals.

• Scaled a fully remote Data & AI team from 2 engineers to 9 consultants, holding 100% utilisation and 75% billable time.
• Shipped GenAI MVPs built on RAG, agents and Semantic Kernel for financial services and transport clients, each with Responsible AI guardrails.
• Led a data-mesh architecture with MLOps and governance on Azure Databricks for a US insurer, improving underwriting efficiency and policyholder retention.
• Built a structured Data & AI certification pathway, and shaped the nearshore and offshore resourcing strategy through senior leadership approval.
• Shaped client opportunities end to end: target architectures, pitches, and oversight of Lead Consultants on risk and escalation.

Ran £1M+ data engineering programmes end to end, from pre-sales through delivery.

• Delivered multiple £1M+ data engineering projects across sectors, on time and within budget, driving retention and repeat engagements.
• Owned full lifecycles: pre-sales, technical assessment, scoping, statements of work and team structuring, reporting to C-level stakeholders.
• Built solutions on Databricks, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Data Factory and BigQuery, including lineage and governance components.

Built the data platform and cloud infrastructure for a crypto trading startup.

• Architected the company's GCP infrastructure and a secured Hadoop platform tuned for real-time workloads.
• Built near-real-time ETL for exchange OHLC pricing, social feeds and trading orders with Kafka, Kudu and StreamSets.
• Contributed predictive models for price and trading signals, and co-built the ERP data structure in Python and Flask.
• Line-managed and mentored engineers, and built CI/CD on GitHub, Jenkins and Kubernetes.

Led the data architecture behind a UK energy retailer's forecasting and customer analytics.

• Architected a secured Cloudera CDH 5.8 cluster with Microsoft AD and Apache Sentry, plus real-time pipelines on Kudu, Impala, Kafka and Spark.
• Improved wholesale price and consumption forecasting with time series, ARIMA, XGBoost and neural network models.
• Built Spark ETL in Scala and Python, ingesting Cassandra, MongoDB and external APIs including Zendesk.

First data engineering role, on the Yellow Pages search and revenue reporting stack.

• Co-built a 15-node Cloudera CDH 4 production cluster, and configured the development cluster it was modelled on.
• Optimised MicroStrategy reporting performance on the Hadoop ecosystem.
• Led a near-real-time revenue reporting project, and built datamarts and dashboards comparing Yellow Pages and Google web traffic.
• Integrated Zoomdata and custom d3.js visualisations, and fed search-engine analysis back to the product team.

Specialised in IT for business: data warehousing, modelling, BI and ERP. Internship at Solocal Group.

Enterprise, software and network architecture. Final internship delivered a BI solution for the Moroccan Post Office on SSIS, SSRS and SQL Server.