Neel Shah

Tech Lead · Senior Data Engineer

📍 Ottawa, ON, Canada ✉️ [email protected] 🌐 neelshah18.com 🔗 LinkedIn 🐙 GitHub 📚 Scholar

Profile

Tech Lead and Senior Data Engineer with 10+ years building and delivering cloud, data, and software platforms in healthcare and financial services. Leads and mentors a six-engineer team, guides architecture and engineering decisions, and works with stakeholders throughout the SDLC. Experience includes platforms processing 1B+ health data points and 1M+ financial transactions per hour.

10+

Years exp.

1B+

Health data points

1M/hr

Transactions

PySpark codebases

Engineers led

3M+

OSS downloads

Leadership & AI

Leadership & Delivery

Cross-functional team leadership
Project planning and roadmaps
Backlog prioritization
Stakeholder management
Agile / Scrum and SDLC
Release management
Mentoring and technical hiring

AI Deployment & Operations

Production model deployment
MLOps and model monitoring
Inference optimization
Open-source model customization
Prompt engineering
AWS Bedrock

Technical Skills

Data Engineering

Python · SQL · PySpark · Apache Spark · ETL · Data lakes

Cloud & Platforms

Azure · AWS · Databricks · Docker · CI/CD

Architecture

REST APIs · FastAPI · Microservices · Distributed systems

Analytics

Power BI · Elasticsearch · Model monitoring · NLP

Healthcare

National health data · Clinical classification · Medication analytics

Financial Services

Credit risk · Fraud · Policy engines · Audit trails

Compliance

PII · PIPEDA · Regulatory controls · WCAG accessibility

Operations

Production incidents · Release management · Reliability

Experience

Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI)

Tech Lead / Program Consultant

July 2023 – Present

Ottawa, ON

AWS BedrockAIPySparkPythonHealth DataLeadership

Lead end-to-end delivery of national healthcare data products with a six-engineer team, from planning through release and production support
Lead an AWS Bedrock AI initiative that maps ICD-10 to ICD-11 and summarizes clinical notes to improve hospital grouping and classification
Delivered an AI-powered pharmaceutical monograph and indication solution within one quarter and under budget, enabling national medication cost and trend analysis through POP Grouper
Designed a privacy-focused, localized AI architecture to protect sensitive healthcare data and infrastructure
Modernized the CMG Grouper from SAS to Python and PySpark, reducing processing time for 24M records from three days to under one hour
Delivered POP Grouper data pipelines processing 1B+ healthcare data points for national analysis and reporting
Manage delivery priorities, risks, releases, and quarterly upgrades across 94 PySpark codebases while mentoring engineers through planning, design, and code reviews

EXL Service (on-site at Goldman Sachs)

Senior Consultant

May 2022 – July 2023

Ottawa, ON

PySparkPythonFastAPICredit RiskFinancial Services

Coordinated four engineers across two concurrent credit-risk and fraud projects, working with business stakeholders to set priorities and keep delivery on track
Built and owned the core policy engine for Apple Card, Walmart Card, and GM Card using Python, PySpark, and FastAPI, processing 1M+ transactions per hour with PII controls and regulatory audit trails
Architected REST APIs handling 1,000+ application requests per minute with sub-second response times, enabling faster and more accurate credit decisions
Resolved multiple P0 production incidents, helping avoid $10M+ in combined client risk exposure
Developed Python and PyUnit automation that reduced end-to-end testing time by 60%
Evaluated technology options and interviewed and selected engineers for the engagement

Canopy Growth Corporation

Web System Architect

July 2021 – April 2022

Ottawa, ON

PythonFastAPIDockerAWSMongoDBMicroservices

Virtualized AEM development and production environments using Docker, Python, and AWS, saving $5M USD annually
Led modernization and delivery across 42 brand websites, moving the team from waterfall to agile to support faster releases and changing priorities
Designed and launched a shared Python and FastAPI microservice on Docker and AWS, supporting product retrieval, checkout, and common workflows at 100,000 requests per hour
Built an automated WCAG analysis tool and KPI-reporting APIs across the digital portfolio

Manulife

Senior Python Developer

August 2020 – July 2021

Waterloo, ON

AzurePythonPower BICI/CDCloud Infrastructure

Built, maintained, and scaled Azure cloud infrastructure of 1,800+ servers (Windows and Linux) with 99.99% uptime SLA
Developed automation scripts for server monitoring, patching, and maintenance using Python, REST API, and Azure
Built real-time Power BI dashboards for Azure infrastructure monitoring, giving the operations team live visibility across 1,800+ servers
Developed and maintained Python scripts for AXIS and Moody's distributed computational environment — reducing operational cost by 5%
Automated CI/CD pipeline using Python, Docker, and Git; reduced debugging time by 45 minutes through automated Azure environment testing

SITA

Python Developer

September 2019 – June 2020

Montreal, QC

PythonAzureMicroservicesPower BIReal-time Systems

Designed and developed a real-time airport analytics system integrating LiDAR and camera hardware using Python and reactive programming — enabling live situational awareness across airport operations
Led migration of a large-scale Python 2 codebase to Python 3, modernizing core airport systems without service disruption
Transformed a legacy monolithic system into a cloud-based microservice architecture on Azure, significantly improving scalability and reliability
Reduced backend testing time by 30 minutes by integrating automated testing into the CI pipeline
Built a global Power BI data visualization platform for Azure product line analytics, enabling organization-wide data-driven decisions

Lakehead University

Research Assistant & Python Developer

November 2017 – May 2019

Thunder Bay, ON

PythonElasticsearchAWSETLNLPResearch

Published three peer-reviewed papers on NLP, public-health analytics, and distributed data systems, earning 100+ citations
Designed a 20-node Elasticsearch cluster and AWS analytics platform used by Health Canada and internal research teams
Developed Random Forest NLP model achieving 93.4% accuracy for population-level public health classification

Datalog.ai

Python Developer

January 2017 – August 2017

Remote

PythonAWSAPIsNLPChatbot

Built an asynchronous chatbot analytics API capable of handling thousands of requests per second
Developed 5+ real-time visualization dashboards for chatbot semantic analysis and topic extraction on AWS
Designed a clustering algorithm for chat-based decision support systems
Created Python and Bash tooling for call center automation, data conversion, and API integration (REST, JSON, CRUD)

Panchamrut Dairy

Python Developer & Data Analyst

July 2014 – December 2016

Godhra, Gujarat, India

PythonSAPTime-seriesETLPower BI

Built real-time data analysis system for raw product cost and transportation logistics using SAP and Python
Developed a time-series sales forecasting model for ice-cream product lines achieving 71% prediction efficiency
Designed ETL logic and report generation pipeline for sales, cost, and inventory data in multiple formats (Excel, CSV, PDF)
Partnered with data warehouse leads to evaluate and redesign ETL architecture, improving pipeline throughput and maintainability