New Cloud based Bank — Data Platform

Head of Data Systems · 2022–2024

The Challenge

The bank needed its data platform and reporting foundation built from scratch — a complete data lake with automated data pipelines, data management, governance, and regulatory reporting for the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority, the Danish Tax Agency, and others.

What I Delivered

I was manager, tech lead, architect, and scrum master in one role — leading a team of 5 to build and operate:

  • Greenfield data lake built from scratch with automated ingestion pipelines
  • Data modelling and preparation of regulatory reports for Danish authorities
  • Data governance with access control, cataloging, and audit trails
  • Automated reporting aligned with financial supervisory requirements

Tech Stack

Infrastructure

  • S3 — data storage (raw / curated / published zones)
  • Glue — ETL & data catalog
  • Lake Formation — fine-grained access control
  • Athena — interactive analytics

Development & Ops

  • Python — data processing logic
  • AWS CDK (TypeScript) — infrastructure-as-code
  • Step Functions — pipeline orchestration
  • QuickSight — dashboards & visualization

Challenges & Solutions

Data Security & Compliance

Implemented end-to-end governance with Lake Formation — column-level security, tag-based access, and full audit trails that satisfied internal risk and external regulators.

Legacy Integration

Built custom connectors and CDC pipelines to stream data from core banking mainframes into S3 without disrupting existing operations.

Performance at Scale

Partitioned data by date and business domain, converted to Parquet, and applied predicate push-down — cutting average query cost and time by 85 %.