Parag Pindoria
I am a
About
Parag Pindoria
Acting Engineering Manager
Sainsbury's · London
Technology leader and engineer specialising in real-time data platforms at enterprise scale. Currently Acting Engineering Manager at Sainsbury's — leading two engineering teams while staying hands-on across architecture, Kafka pipelines, and cloud infrastructure on AWS.
- Delivering dependable, high-throughput systems with Kafka, Confluent, AWS, Kubernetes, and modern CI/CD tooling
- Led cross-team initiatives in complex environments, managing dependencies and surfacing risks early
- Balanced leadership with hands-on engineering across architecture, delivery, and platform health
- Invested in team growth through 1-to-1s, mentoring, and day-to-day coaching
Facts
Years of data engineering experience
Years of cloud experience
Years of Python & Java experience
Certifications
Skills
As technologies rapidly evolve 🚀, I am always learning and experiencing these new technologies.
Here's a list I have used and experienced.
Experience
Professional Experience
Acting Engineering Manager
- Led a team of 8 (5 engineers), owning delivery while building the team's autonomy to decide and act day to day
- Drove delivery and technical alignment across a sister engineering team of 7, partnering with its Engineering Manager to keep both teams on track and clear cross-team risks early
- Ran quarterly planning and reprioritisation across two teams with product, balancing priorities against engineering capacity
- Led a Confluent and Kafka cloud migration on a platform handling 4M+ transactions per day, cutting technical risk with zero disruption
- Kept production stable across 20+ processors and 10+ critical systems with 0 critical incidents and no escalated complaints
- Grew engineers through 1-to-1s, mentoring and feedback, raising everyday engineering practices
- Owned a £1.8M GBP+ budget across both teams at 97% forecast accuracy
Senior Software Data Engineer
- Led delivery and operation of key initiatives on a business-critical real-time retail platform
- Mentored engineers through pair programming and knowledge sharing
- Hands-on technical lead for Java and Kafka (Confluent) event-driven pipelines and reliability
- Raised engineering quality via GitHub PR reviews and stronger testing and observability
- Delivered reliable integrations and low-risk change across upstream and downstream teams
- Shaped architecture and documentation for long-term maintainability
- Delivered the data integration behind a new consumer-facing product on time with a smooth launch
Data Engineer
- Built real-time data streaming with Kafka and Java on Kubernetes, improving reliability
- Built a sequence-validation pipeline that guaranteed completeness of upstream data, uncovering previously unknown bugs in till systems
- Supported agile delivery through sprint planning and close collaboration with engineers and product
- Reviewed pull requests, improving code quality and maintainability across the team
- Ran integration testing and low-risk delivery with upstream and downstream teams
- Resolved production issues on call, minimising business disruption
Associate Data Engineer
- Architected and built end-to-end pipelines ingesting internal and external data into cloud platforms
- Developed event-driven Python AWS Lambda functions ingesting into Snowflake via S3 and SQS event triggers
- Built IaC with Terraform and CloudFormation, and CI/CD with GitHub and Jenkins
- Developed SQL warehouse objects and ETL pipelines, designing schemas with data modellers
- Orchestrated Snowflake streams and stored procedures via Airflow; added testing, monitoring and alerting
Cloud Engineer Trainee
- Selected by Generation UK&I to join the AWS re/Start programme
- Completed a 12-week, full-time classroom-based programme covering IT fundamentals, AWS Cloud, and professional skills
- Built core skills in Linux OS, scripting in Python and Shell
- Applied core AWS services: EC2, S3, IAM, VPC, Lambda, CloudFormation, RDS and Route 53
- Demonstrated strong verbal and written communication, explaining technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
Education
Kingsbury Sixth Form
September 2016 – July 2018
- Computer Science
- Business
- Mathematics
Kingsbury High School
September 2012 – July 2016
- Mathematics
- Biology
- Chemistry
- Computer Science
- Design Technology
- English Language
- English Literature
- Geography
- German
- Gujarati
- Physics
- Religious Studies
Currently Exploring
What I'm actively learning outside of work.
Full-Stack JavaScript
Volunteering as a web developer for a community charity, building and maintaining their website — applying full-stack JavaScript beyond my data engineering background to give something back outside of work.
AI-Augmented Engineering
Actively leveraging AI tools to optimise workflows, accelerate delivery, automate repetitive tasks, and spend more time on high-value engineering and leadership work.
Community & Events
Conferences and events I attend to stay current, meet people in the industry, and keep learning.
AWS re:Invent
Las Vegas, USAAmazon's flagship annual cloud conference — the largest AWS event globally, covering compute, data, AI and platform engineering. Read my write-up →
Current by Confluent
London, UKThe leading Apache Kafka and data streaming conference — covering real-time architecture, event-driven systems and the broader Confluent ecosystem.
AWS Summit London
London, UKAWS's flagship UK event, bringing together cloud practitioners, architects and engineers across data, security, AI and platform topics.
Devoxx
London, UKOne of Europe's largest developer conferences, with deep technical sessions on Java, distributed systems, cloud-native and software engineering craft.
Certifications
Here is a list of my earned certifications.
