Sivakumar Ramaswamy· Engineering Lead, Data

Sivakumar Ramaswamy

Engineering Lead — Data Platforms. Designing and operating large-scale, governed data infrastructure across batch and streaming workloads on AWS, Snowflake, Databricks, and Kafka.

Sydney, Australia sivankumar86@gmail.com

Download CV (2-page PDF)

About

Sydney, Australia · Australian Citizen · 16+ years across India → Mexico → USA → Australia

Engineering leader specialising in data platforms — designing and operating governed data infrastructure across batch and streaming workloads. I stand up enterprise-grade ingestion, storage, orchestration, governance, and observability, and grow high-performance teams to own those systems end-to-end.

Hybrid leadership and hands-on engineering: I set strategy and roadmap with stakeholders across research, analytics, security, and SRE — and stay close to the code through design reviews, architectural decisions, and production contributions.

Background spans distributed systems at AWS, big-data processing with Spark and Kafka, applied ML and GenAI in production, and security & compliance modernisation (APRA CPS 234).

Experience

Present

Lead Engineer — Enterprise Data Platform

Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) · Sydney, Australia
  • Lead the architecture and technical design of CBA's enterprise data platform (IDAP) — cloud-native patterns for ingestion, transformation, orchestration, governance, observability, and CI/CD on AWS, Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, and Terraform.
  • Own the platform roadmap with architects, product owners, security teams, and engineering leaders; define engineering standards, reusable frameworks, deployment automation, and production readiness gates adopted across multiple business domains.
  • Drove platform adoption across business domains through tenant onboarding, golden paths, and developer enablement — reducing time-to-first-data-product for new teams.
  • Designed and implemented enterprise data sharing on AWS DataZone and Snowflake — governed self-service access to data products with strengthened metadata, lineage, access controls, and audit.
  • Partnered with security and SRE to converge on shared patterns for encryption, authentication, identity, and access control across the platform.
  • Delivered critical security, compliance, and platform modernisation programs — APRA CPS 234 control remediation, Airflow upgrades, container platform migration, infrastructure automation, and production operational improvements.
  • Build team capability through hiring, design reviews, mentoring, and technical enablement; grow engineers toward staff/senior contributions.
  • Hands-on contributor across Python, Terraform, dbt, GitHub Actions, and AWS services — delivered 1,100+ production pull requests and reusable platform components adopted across multiple engineering teams.
2021 — recent

Data & AI Architect

ZIP · Sydney, Australia
  • Architected real-time event and analytics infrastructure on Snowplow, Kafka, and Amplitude — high-volume ingestion, schema management, and downstream activation across product surfaces.
  • Designed and operated data warehouses and lakes on AWS Redshift, S3, and DynamoDB; standardised batch and streaming ingestion patterns across teams.
  • Built ML deployment pipelines on Databricks Asset Bundles, Terraform, and GitLab; containerised models on EKS and Databricks Serverless with alerting and anomaly detection.
  • Shipped production GenAI features using OpenAI APIs and Bedrock Agents — including a knowledge-base REST API — on Kubernetes.
  • Drove low-/no-code ingress and egress with Fivetran, Airbyte, Census, and Braze; integrated OpsGenie, Atlan, and Jira for incident management and lineage.
  • Implemented conversion workflows across Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and TikTok Ads.
  • Mentored engineers, ran brown-bag sessions, and published technical content and sample solutions.
2016 — 2021

Big Data Engineer

AWS · Australia
  • Built and operated distributed large-scale data processing solutions on Apache Spark for AWS customers.
  • Implemented search and deep-learning training/inference platforms using SageMaker and OpenSearch.
  • Partnered with customer data scientists to deploy and scale ML models in production, with a focus on reliability and cost.
  • Drove customer code reviews and engineering excellence across Java, Python, and Kotlin services.
2015

Startup Technical Consultant

AI Hello · USA
  • Developed a highly scalable backend with Spring Boot.
  • Attended VC seed-fund meetings alongside the CEO.
  • Partnered with the CTO to design and implement early product architecture.
2014 — 2016

Senior Java Consultant

Northern Trust · USA
  • Built Collateral Management System and OTC Derivatives platform components.
  • Managed cross-functional teams to deliver projects on time and within budget.
  • Led design brainstorming sessions to innovate and optimise complex module development.
  • Produced detailed technical architecture diagrams for ongoing projects.
2013 — 2014

Big Data Developer

Dictionary.com · Mexico
  • Built an end-to-end analytics system using Hadoop, Hive, and Chart.js.
  • Implemented ML clustering with the Mahout library.
  • Tracked website traffic, engagement, conversion, and retention metrics (cohort, churn).
2009 — 2013

Software Developer

Ask.com · India
  • Designed, developed, and deployed Java applications using Spring Framework and Hibernate.
  • Implemented RESTful APIs, microservices, and database schemas.
  • Championed coding standards and best practices through code reviews.

Skills

Languages
Python Java Scala Go SQL dbt
Distributed systems
Partitioning Replication Consistency / availability Reliability API & system design
Streaming
Kafka Schema Registry Snowplow Kinesis
Batch processing
Apache Spark Databricks AWS Glue EMR
Storage & table formats
S3 Snowflake Redshift Delta Lake DynamoDB RDS
Orchestration & CI/CD
Airflow GitHub Actions GitLab Terraform CloudFormation Databricks Asset Bundles
Governance, lineage & security
AWS DataZone Atlan Schema management Access control & audit APRA CPS 234 IAM & encryption
Containers & runtime
Docker Kubernetes EKS
Observability
Elementary Soda Dynatrace OpenSearch
ML & GenAI
SageMaker Bedrock Agents OpenAI APIs Databricks ML
Leadership
Roadmap ownership Team building & hiring Design reviews Mentoring Stakeholder partnership

Testimonials

I want to take a moment to properly recognise Siva for the outstanding customer care and leadership he's shown across the quarter.

Time and again, Siva went above and beyond for our tenants — stepping up to own tenant consults and operational work, often outside normal hours, simply because it needed to be done. That kind of commitment makes a real difference to the business we support, and it doesn't go unnoticed.

Beyond the day-to-day, Siva actively worked to make the squad better. He introduced a weekly design and architecture forum, ran brown-bag learning sessions to empower the wider IB&M data engineer community, and drove the delivery of certificate automation that eliminated manual effort and allowed us to retire 11 manually-managed certificates. His cumulative impact is significant and the team will continue to benefit in the quarters to come.

What stands out most is how Siva approaches his work — with a clear customer-first mindset, practical problem-solving, and real ownership. He's helped raise the bar for how we operate and deliver, and contributes to a positive culture we can all rally behind.

Thank you, Siva. Your initiative, leadership and commitment have made a genuine difference this quarter. It's greatly appreciated.

James Billett Product Owner · IBM

Hi Siva, wanting to write you this recognition and it is long overdue. You have only been in the organisation for ~4 months and you have made a massive impact to IDAP's trajectory.

You have brought with you a wealth of technical expertise and experience and have gone over and above in terms of delivery speed.

Your expertise enables you to regularly challenge your peers with real-world examples and the ability to prototype quickly to verify design thinking.

You have helped us get a long way in adopting dbt and "analytics platform thinking" and I can see this improving the way IB&M does data delivery.

I have also observed you pushing the CDL engineering team to support you in prototyping externalisation of Snowflake data to Iceberg, and you were able to successfully prove out the "Snowflake as a Producer" pattern.

You have also shown yourself to be an engineering leader within our squad, regularly guiding our junior members and pushing them to grow whilst completing their tasks.

I could probably go on and on but in short it has been great to have you on board and I look forward to succeeding on IDAP with you.

Clement Wang COE · IBM

Siva — thank you for your commitment to the Group's data aspirations. Having shown excellence in design and execution in leading the build on IDAP, today you shared that knowledge and experience with leaders from around the bank.

You displayed expertise and an ability to communicate complex ideas and build alignment amongst those leaders.

When you spoke, people listened. You're a valued asset to IB&M Technology and CBA. Thank you!

Alistair MacArthur Crew Lead · IBM, CBA

I'd like to recognise Sivakumar for leading the transformation of the IB&M Data Platform (IDAP) into an enterprise-ready foundation for data mesh, self‑service, and data federation. His technical expertise has been instrumental in implementing multi-tenancy support for IB&M, dbt–Snowflake integration with Iceberg tables, and AWS Glue Catalog integration to enable data mesh and federation capabilities.

Most notably, he recently solved two critical challenges: coordinating with the Snowflake vendor and CDAO teams to address a catalog permissions bug, and creating an innovative dbt macro that elegantly handles Iceberg table processing in read-only environments.

Sivakumar's continuous mentorship of development teams and his positive "can-do" attitude exemplify our values and drive our platform's success forward. Well done Siva and keep up the amazing work!

Alen Trivuncevic Chapter Lead · IBM

I'm incredibly pleased to share that Trade Finance has successfully gone live with our first set of data products on the IB&M Data & Analytics Platform (IDAP), published to the Marketplace for Group consumption.

This represents a significant milestone for IB&M, with Trade Finance among the first data producers on the platform, pioneering a domain-led approach to delivering reusable, consumable data products across the Group.

Thank you to our Trade Finance squad and to our partners across the platform and data ecosystem — Alistair MacArthur, James Billett, Alen Trivuncevic, Sivakumar Ramaswamy, the broader Core IDAP team, and Clement Wang for CoE guidance and support.

Vanessa Santo Lopez Crew Lead, Trade Finance · CBA

Siva, I truly want to thank you for stepping up and supporting the team in resolving the service domain onboarding issue that had been blocking FCC.

The way you leaned in to help the tenant, took ownership, and worked through the challenges with patience and clarity made a real difference. It wasn't just about fixing the issue — it was about the care and commitment you showed in unblocking others and getting things moving again.

Thank you for stepping in and driving this through with urgency and care. Your support has had a tangible impact on restoring momentum for FCC. Really appreciate you going above and beyond here — it means a lot to the team.

Jalpa Dave Darji Program Manager · CBA

Big thank you to Renjith & Sivakumar for their outstanding efforts as our Your Voice Champions in Data Engineering. They turned insights into clear actions, consistently drove improvement through the fortnightly Champions Forum, and helped deliver strong progress across risk culture, AI and innovation, career recognition and team support.

Their commitment and follow-through have made a real difference! Thank you both for driving positive change.

Alen Trivuncevic Chapter Lead · IBM, CBA

Huge congratulations to Sivakumar, Manisha and Frank for demonstrating Courage as the driving force behind their respective squads in the successful production release of the IB&M Data Platform (IDAP). Their leadership in navigating a complex, cross-crew delivery across IB&M and CDAO has established a critical cloud-native foundation for reusable, self-service data products and advanced the Group Data & AI Strategy.

Alen Trivuncevic Chapter Lead · IBM, CBA

Excellent work, Siva, on onboarding the IB&M Data & Analytics Platform to certificate automation. This delivers a significant uplift in security and reliability across CBA, while reducing risk, cost, and manual effort, and improving squad velocity.

Your work also enabled Geetika to retire 11 manually managed certificates, achieving 100% certificate automation for IDAP squads in Q3.

Alen Trivuncevic Chapter Lead · IBM

Congratulations Siva on successfully completing the 16-hour AppSec Champions Academy and certification, demonstrating your commitment to advanced defensive coding practices and strengthening our squad's embedded security capability in line with SDLC requirements.

Alen Trivuncevic Chapter Lead · IBM

Thanks, Siva, for the continued support during my first month in the IDAP-core team. I'm really impressed by the depth and breadth of your knowledge. Also, thank you for your patience with my newbie questions.

Vineeth Colleague · CBA

Certifications & Achievements

Education

Diploma

Data Science

MIT · Melbourne, Australia
Bachelor

Computer Science

Bachelor's Degree

Contact

Open to conversations on data platforms, distributed systems, and engineering leadership. The fastest way to reach me is email — or say hello on LinkedIn.

sivankumar86@gmail.com  ·  LinkedIn  ·  GitHub