Stewart Fohlo

STEWART FOHLO SENIOR DATA ENGINEER-- Midrand South Africa PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY A versatile and impact-driven cloud and data engineer with over a decade of hands-on experience spanning AWS architecture, software engineering, big data platforms, and DevOps. I specialize in designing and optimizing scalable cloud-native solutions using AWS & Azure services, with proven ability to jump into complex problems and deliver rapid, high-quality results. As a certified AWS Developer and Microsoft Azure Data Engineer, I bring cross-functional expertise in ETL/ELT pipeline development, distributed systems, automation, and end-to-end solution delivery. Known for my agility and problem-solving acumen, I thrive in fast-paced, multi-team environments where high-impact contributions are expected. I am deeply committed to data security, governance, and operational excellence across all stages of development and deployment. EDUCATION WEBSITES, PORTFOLIOS, PROFILES PhD Candidate, Computer Science University of KwaZulu-Natal Pietermaritzburg, South Africa 04/2023 – 12/2025 • https://www.linkedin.com/in/stewart-fohlo-b-/ • https://www.credly.com/users/stewart-fohlo/badges • https://bold.pro/my/stewart-fohlo- Master of Science in Computer Science & Engineering Parul University Gujarat, India 05/2016 – 08/2018 Bachelor of Science: Computer Science Honors Degree Midlands State University Gweru, Zimbabwe 01/2011 – 12/2014 CERTIFICATIONS AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate Microsoft Certified Azure Data Engineer DAMA – Data Management Professional Certification (CDMP) Multi-Cloud Aviatrix Certified Engineer Neo4j Certified Professional Hortonworks Big Data Hadoop Certificate Leading Teams Certificate - University of Michigan WORK HISTORY Analytics Group, Sub-Contracting to ABSA Bank - Lead Data Engineer Sandton, South Africa • 07/2025 - Current • Lead Data Engineer in Fraud and Credit Risk Division at ABSA Bank reporting to the division's executive head. • Aligned business objectives with technical requirements through close collaboration with product owners providing insights based on available data sources. • Identified areas for improvement within existing ETL frameworks to maximize efficiency without sacrificing accuracy or integrity of results produced during transformations applied on ingested datasets. • Ensured compliance with relevant regulations related to data storage, privacy, security, and transmission standards by staying updated on legal developments impacting the industry. • Lead the implementation of Generative Business Intelligence Reporting (Gen-BI) on AWS platform leveraging services that include Redshift, Glue, S3 and QuickSight. • Collaborate with the platforms teams in developing data pipelines and also assist in architecture designs and implementation. • Assisting other team members with data engineering tasks and data engineering support whenever required to do so. Analytics Group, Sub-Contracting at BMW IT Hub - Senior Data Engineer Pretoria, South Africa • 01/2019 - 07/2025 • Design and implement scalable and robust processes for CNSS Certified Network Security Specialist Hadoop Programming, Administration & Apache Spark Enterprise Deep Learning With Tensorflow SOFTWARE PySpark Advanced Python Advanced AWS Services Upper intermediate Azure Cloud Upper intermediate Hadoop Advanced Spark Advanced SQL Advanced NoSQL Advanced Snowflake Intermediate Microsoft Fabric Advanced Onelake Advanced SKILLS Data pipeline development ETL processes Data Warehousing Cloud architecture Data governance Big data technologies ingesting and transforming complex datasets. • Design, develop, construct, maintain, and support data pipelines for ETL from a multitude of sources. • Create blueprints for data management systems to centralize, protect, and maintain data sources. • Focused on data stewardship and curation, as the Senior Data Engineer I enabled the data scientists to run their models to achieve the desired business outcomes • Ingest large, complex data sets that meet functional and nonfunctional requirements. • Enable the business to solve the problem of working with large volumes of data in diverse formats, and in doing so, enable innovative solutions. • Design and build bulk and delta data lift patterns for optimal extraction, transformation, and loading of data. • Development of API's for returning data to Enterprise Applications. • Debugged a data pipeline when batch or streaming loads have failed with affect downstream reports & users. • Migrated legacy ETL jobs without breaking downstream dashboards. • Designed & Developed EMR Clusters that could recover gracefully when S3 times out or when Spark clusters expectedly dies. • Mentored junior data engineers and also assisted the Operations team to debug data related issues and incidents. • Developed CICD pipelines using Github Actions and Terraform on AWS Analytics Group, Sub-Contracting at Capitec Bank - Senior AWS Data Engineer Sandton, South Africa • 06/2022 - 12/2022 • Company Overview: Capitec Bank's credit products include Home Loans/Bonds, Personal Loans, Credit Cards, Vehicle Financing and Business Financing. • Designing and implementing an end-to-end, cost-effective data architecture spanning data ingest from disparate sources, storage, scaling and vending to business stakeholders. • Retrieve and analyze data using a broad set of AWS technologies (e.g. Athena, Aurora, Redshift and S3) and resources, knowing how, when, and which to use. • Extract, transform, and load data from many data sources using SQL, Scripting and other ETL tools like AWS Glue and PySpark. • Facilitate the selection, licensing, and implementation of a data visualization product with PowerBI. • Lead deep dive analysis of customer utilization behaviours, surface key insights, and identify high value actions the growth team can action in product and marketing strategies. • Managing the availability, usability, integrity and security of the data at Capitec Bank's credit products, based on internal data standards and policies that also control data usage. • Partner closely with Product, Tech, and Operations leaders to define and analyze experiments, including any lessons learned and recommended changes to approach. • Define, measure and present metrics / automated reports on multiple products to senior leadership. • Implementing effective data governance standards, ensuring that data is consistent and trustworthy for accurate analytics SQL programming Data visualization and reporting. • Mentoring juniors and performance reviews • Sprint planning and work allocation • Capitec Bank's credit products include Home Loans/Bonds, Personal Loans, Credit Cards, Vehicle Financing and Business Financing. Analytics Group, Sub-Contracting at Vodacom - Senior Data Engineer Midrand, Gauteng • 10/2021 - 05/2022 • • • • • • • • • • • • • AWS Cloud Data Engineering Vodacom International Markets Data Engineering AWS Datalake development and support Design and develop highly performant, scalable, and stable Big Data cloud native applications Source data from a variety of different sources, in the correct format, meeting data quality standards and assuring timeous access to data and analytical insights Build batch and real-time data pipelines, using automated testing and deployment using AWS Glue, Step Functions, Lamda, Apache Airflow and custom Python/PySpark code Build transformations to produce enriched data insights on AWS Athena and Redshift Integrate applications with business systems to enable value from analytic models and enable decision making Define and implement best practices relating to cloud economics, software engineering and data engineering to ensure a well-architected cloud framework with data management practices built into each design. Work with the architecture team to evolve the Big Data capabilities (reusable assets/patterns) and components to support the business requirements/objectives Research, investigate and evaluate new technologies and methods to improve the delivery and sustainability of data applications and services Develop dynamic applications health and performance dashboards to be sent out to relevant stakeholders on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Make contributions to the process of defining best practices for the agile development of applications to run on the Big Data Platform Analytics Group, Sub-Contracting at Standard Bank - Data Engineer Johannesburg, South Africa • 10/2019 - 09/2021 • Automating the manual upload of employee data files from SAP HC into Clearview app on Azure Cloud and enforcing that the two applications are in real-time sync. • Collaborate with different teams in the bank i.e IT Security team, DNS Team, F5 Load Balancer Team, Internet Services, Oracle, Linux, Wintel and Firewall team to come up with various data solutions and automation approaches required by the bank. • Responsible for maintaining quality reference data in Oracle by performing operations such as cleaning, transformation and ensuring integrity in a relational environment for Group Internal Audit Network Tool (GIANT) application. • Developed SQL scripts and optimized SQL queries for pulling out reports to be utilized by business. • Initiated a lot of fine tuning mechanisms to tune the database as well as the queries to complete a set of given jobs or tasks in optimal time. • Reports development using PowerBI • Develop and maintain data recovery environment for on premise applications i.e One World, GIANT, Enterprise Risk Manager. • Developing, implementing and supporting GIANT application running on Tomcat middleware. • Ensuring that applications are on the latest supported infrastructure and versions. • Setup and maintain applications monitoring using Appdynamics, Azure AppInsight and Splunk and also integrate email alerts, MS Teams and Kaizala for notifications. • Develop dynamic applications health and performance dashboard to be sent out to relevant stakeholders on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Analytics Group, Sub-Contracting at SkX Protiviti - Data Analytics Consultant Rosebank, South Africa • 03/2019 - 02/2020 • ETL Development of data from various Big Data sources i.e SAP, MSSQL, OracleDB, MySQL Teradata, Hive and NoSQL DBs • Develop SQL and ACL CAATs for clients like Transnet, Telkom, Airports Company of South Africa, National Treasury, South African Airways and Department of Labour (Compensation Fund) • Identify, design, and develop data analytics extract routines to support audit activities performed by the Internal Audit team. • Manage data extraction, storage, transformation, and processing through data analytics routines, and generate output for visualization/analysis by the Internal Audit team. • Use data analysis tools to automate audit testing and develop techniques for continuous auditing and analyzing large volumes of data. • Interact with management and business partners to identify appropriate data sources and data elements required for analytics, applying professional scepticism when assessing data sources and validating the completeness and accuracy of data received. • Interact and collaborate with Internal Audit team members in working towards departmental goals. • Perform audit tests of controls by obtaining and analyzing audit evidence, preparing audit working papers, evaluating test results, and drawing conclusions on the adequacy and effectiveness of controls. Analytics Group, Sub-Contracting at Absa Bank - Big Data Developer Johannesburg, South Africa • 11/2018 - 10/2019 • Big Data Development for Financial Crime and Conduct Risk (Hortonworks) • Tools: HDFS, Apache Spark, Scala, HiveQL, Beeline, Sqoop, Oozie, Zookeeper, Java • Hadoop development and implementation. • Loading from disparate data sets. • Pre-processing using Hive and Pig • Perform data quality checks in a methodical manner to understand how to accurately utilize client data. • Expert level programming skills using Hadoop to meet the challenges of advanced data manipulation, complicated programming logic, and large data volumes. • Communicate results and methodology with the project team and clients with the ability to work in offshore/onshore model. • Provide solutions for data driven applications involving large and complex data and providing reconciliation and test cases. • Understand customer's Business processes and pain areas which need attention. • Solution Architecture for the entire flow from source to end reporting data marts. • Design Conceptual and physical data model for a global data warehouse in the Hadoop world (ETL versus ELT). • High Level & Low Level design for ETL Components in Hadoop. • Test prototypes and oversee handover to operational teams. • Propose best practices/standards. • Hands on work on Sqooping and Hive transformations, Build monitoring and testing mechanisms around Sqooping and data transformations. • Continuous improvements to the current Hadoop set up in terms of scalability, reliability and monitoring. Escrow Group (EFS) - Software Developer Harare, Zimbabwe • 05/2015 - 08/2018 • Banking & Microfinance software development • Developing web based software using computer programming languages such as VB.net, C#, Java and MSSQL. • Performing extensive software testing and stringent quality checks as per the QC guidelines to ensure an error free as well as optimum final product to the user. • Creating and maintaining the ASP.NET based websites and their web applications as per the initial guidelines of the client. • Making changes to existing web applications according to the feedback received from the end users or clients. • Testing the applications and websites on different web browsers to ensure a standard user experience for the clients across all platforms. • Developing documentation throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC). • Training the end user or client on the final product as well as providing technical support whenever required, weekends included. Steward Bank - Software Developer Harare, Zimbabwe • 01/2014 - 05/2015 • Executed full software development life cycle (SDLC) • Developed flowcharts, layouts and documentation to identify requirements and solutions • Wrote well-designed and testable code • Troubleshoot, debug and upgrade existing systems • Integrated software components into a fully functional software system • Documented and maintained software functionality • Deployed programs and evaluate user feedback • Ensured software is updated with latest features. Steward Bank - Associate Software Developer (Intern) Harare, Zimbabwe • 01/2013 - 12/2013 . #HRJ#9ee0fbdb-39fd-4d0 2-8557-a4696d 113184 # • Collaborated with cross-functional teams for seamless integration of new features and functionalities. • Kept up-to-date with industry trends and emerging technologies, applying relevant insights to ongoing projects as needed. • Worked with developers to identify and remove software bugs. • Conducted module and regression tests. • Discussed issues with team members to provide resolution and apply best practices. • Supported Data Center Infrastructure issues PUBLICATIONS • Google Scholar Reference • The Role of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems in the Implementation of ZimASSET • Empirical Review Paper on Voice Recognition & Feature Extraction Techniques