Austin Wallace
Data Engineer
Summary
Data Engineer with 9+ years building Databricks/Snowflake/dbt platforms that move billions of rows. Known for improving team practices and collaboration, and establishing best practices for AI use in security-critical settings.
Experience
Data Engineer @ Clio
2024-08 – Present
Own 10+ Databricks pipelines and Terraform infrastructure.
- Unlocked $1 million+ worth of value by enabling analysis of our AI assistant's conversations
- Automated token rotation for Looker/dbt→Databricks, eliminating an average of an incident every month from expired tokens
- Built a schema/table diff tool (Python) used during Redshift→Databricks migration; caught 20+ data defects pre-launch and enabled final cutoff of infra costing 100k+ a year
- Wrote the company AI best-practices guide; directly responsible for new model usage by 500+ engineers
- Coached or onboarded 20+ engineers on their specific AI workflow; helped increase AI usage by 20x while remaining responsible
Data Developer @ New Jersey Devils
2022-05 – 2024-08
Sole Data Developer architecting end-to-end data platform.
- Architected, built, and operated end-to-end data platform supporting 10 analysts/managers responsible for allocating millions of dollars of player salary
- Ingested NHL tracking at 10 million rows a game; increasing available data by 10,000x
- Built/maintained 40+ dbt models across Postgres/Snowflake; enabled both detailed analysis and summaries that directly powered live dashboards
Data Developer @ Teck Resources – RACE21
2020-10 – 2022-05
Transformed legacy alert system into modern service.
- As part of a cross-functional team of three, transformed an untestable, unextendible, esoteric alert system based in PostgreSQL Stored Procedures
- Built unit and integration tested, modularized, configurable, well-documented alert service written in Python
- Deployed with Terraform to Microsoft Azure
Projects
- Qdrill — https://qdrill.app
Real-world quadball coaching app featuring real-time drag-and-drop practice planning and polished practice viewer. Built for real users including Team Canada.
SvelteKit · Postgres · Vercel · 87k+ LOC
- Solstice — https://github.com/soleilheaney/solstice
Developing a modern alternative to Topscore for Quadball Canada (target 2026). 20k+ lines of end-to-end-tested TypeScript with emphasis on professional quality and best practices.
TypeScript · React · TanStack Start
Skills
- Data Platforms — Databricks, Unity Catalog, Snowflake, dbt, PostgreSQL, Delta Lake
- Programming — Python, SQL, Go, pandas, PySpark
- Cloud & Infrastructure — AWS S3/IAM, Azure, Terraform, CI/CD
- Data Engineering — Data Modeling, Data Warehousing, Batch & Near-Real-Time Pipelines, Observability
- AI & Collaboration — Responsible AI Enablement, Stakeholder Collaboration, Best Practices Guide