VISHNU BAPATHI
ExecEng
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Data & AI Engineering Leader

Vishnu Bapathi

Data & AI Engineering Leader

vishnu.maheswar@gmail.comLinkedInMediumDallas, TX

Data & AI Engineering Leader with 15+ years building enterprise platforms and growing engineering organizations for Fortune 500 clients. At BCG, I own technical direction for multi-million-dollar programs — hiring and leading 30+ engineers, managing $4M+ in annual cloud spend, and presenting data strategy to C-suite stakeholders. Currently leading GenAI adoption across 70+ engineers, combining deep platform expertise (Databricks, Snowflake, Spark) with the organizational leadership to drive adoption at enterprise scale.

Career Timeline

Boston Consulting Group

BCG Platinion / BCG X

Data & AI Engineering Leader

May 2021 – Present
Dallas, TX
  • Built the data engineering practice team from 5 to 30+ engineers through structured hiring, technical interview design, onboarding frameworks, and career development laddering — establishing engineering standards and delivery governance adopted across BCG's technology practice
  • Owned technical direction for programs valued at $3–8M, reporting to client CTOs, CDOs, and Managing Directors on architecture decisions, risk trade-offs, and roadmap priorities. Presented quarterly data strategy to C-suite stakeholders
  • Managed $4M+ annual cloud infrastructure budget across Azure, AWS, and Databricks — negotiating vendor contracts, optimizing spend through reserved capacity and autoscaling strategies, and establishing FinOps reporting for client transparency
  • Led GenAI adoption across 70+ engineers and 6 product teams — 85% reduction in re-orientation time, 150% increase in feature throughput. Owned the $2M program budget and reported weekly to client VP of Engineering
  • Production-hardened a 170M+ row Databricks/Spark route optimization platform — 67% runtime improvement, 40% compute cost reduction. Owned $1.5M annual infrastructure budget
  • Orchestrated 5 parallel workstreams as single technical owner for OEM pricing platform — 36+ Power BI views, SOX compliance. Hired and onboarded 4 engineers mid-engagement to recover delivery pace
  • Architected a GenAI-enabled commodity trading platform on Azure combining ML forecasting with LLM-driven intelligence and RAG pipeline patterns
  • Designed enterprise data platform spanning 9 business domains and 43 entities for healthcare operations. Led architecture workshops with client CTO and 6 department heads — decisions shaped a $3M+ multi-year investment
  • Designed MDM strategy for a major utilities provider — CDC ingestion from mainframe systems, Snowflake data lakehouse, cross-functional data governance supporting customer 360 and billing analytics

AT&T

Principal Data Engineer / Advanced Analytics Principal

Apr 2018 – May 2021
Dallas/Fort Worth, TX
  • Owned data architecture strategy for marketing analytics organization serving 3 business units and 50+ analysts — designed scalable systems integrating relational, geospatial, and time-series data across petabyte-scale environments on AWS and Azure
  • Led a team of 8 analysts and data engineers; defined team OKRs, sprint cadence, and delivery standards for experimentation programs in partnership with marketing, CX, and commercial operations
  • Drove modern data stack adoption across the organization — evaluated and deployed orchestration tools, established CI/CD pipelines, and migrated legacy batch processes to event-driven architectures
  • Delivered executive dashboards (Power BI, Tableau) enabling C-suite visibility into $200M+ marketing spend effectiveness — churn analytics, campaign ROI, and customer cohort performance
  • Built and validated predictive models for churn forecasting and retention targeting; A/B testing framework influenced $15M+ annual retention program allocation

DST Systems (SS&C)

Senior Data Engineer

Aug 2014 – Apr 2017
Kansas City, MO
  • Led architecture of centralized data platforms for financial and asset management clients — enabling portfolio analytics, compliance dashboards, and operational reporting for capital markets organizations
  • Developed lineage-aware ETL pipelines with regulatory rigor: audit logging, automated quality checks, and observability metrics for SOX/SEC reporting
  • Integrated Bloomberg and Morningstar data sources and delivered cost analytics platforms

MedeAnalytics · Hewlett Packard · Infosys

Sr Data Engineer / Data Engineer / Systems Engineer

2009 – 2015
Dallas / Bangalore / Chennai
  • Built reusable data ingestion layers for healthcare and enterprise clients. ETL development (Informatica, SSIS), Tableau/Business Objects reporting, and data warehouse design

Organizational Impact

  • Built BCG's data engineering practice team from 5 to 30+ through structured hiring and career development
  • Managed $4M+ annual cloud infrastructure budget across Azure, AWS, and Databricks
  • Owned delivery governance for programs valued at $3–8M across Fortune 500 clients
  • Defined engineering standards, interview frameworks, and onboarding processes adopted practice-wide
  • Presented quarterly data strategy and architecture decisions to client C-suite stakeholders

Skills & Expertise

Leadership

Global team leadership (30+ engineers)Hiring & org-buildingExecutive advisory & C-suite communicationStrategic roadmaps & OKRs$4M+ infrastructure budget managementVendor management & contract negotiationEngineering standards & career ladderingDDP program leadership

Data Platforms

SnowflakeDatabricksSparkDelta LakeKafkaAirflowdbtInformaticaRedshiftSSISReltio MDM

AI/ML & GenAI

LLMsRAG pipelinesEmbeddingsVector databasesPrompt engineeringClaude CodeAgent SDKMLOpsPredictive modeling

Cloud

Azure (ADF, Synapse, Databricks, Fabric)AWS (S3, Lambda, EKS)GCP (BigQuery, Dataflow)DockerKubernetesTerraform

Languages

PythonScalaSQLNode.jsReactREST/GraphQL APIs

BI & Analytics

Power BITableauLookerQuickSightDOMOSemantic modeling

Data Architecture

Data LakehouseData MeshMDMData ContractsData LineageData VaultDimensional modelingStreamingCDC

Governance

SOXSECGDPRHIPAAData quality frameworksRBACPolicy-as-code

Education & Certifications

Education

MS Information Technology and Management

University of Texas at Dallas

December 2013|GPA: 3.96
Dean's Excellence Scholarship

Certifications

  • Agentic AI

    Harvard Data Science Initiative

    2025

  • Climate & Sustainability Foundational: Accelerator

    BCG

    2024

  • Azure Data Engineer Associate

    Microsoft

    2021

  • Azure Fundamentals

    Microsoft

    2021

Publications & Thought Leadership

MediumApr 2026

The Amnesia Tax — AI Engineering Memory Architecture

GenAILLMAI Engineering
MediumSep 2025

Agentic Data Contracts

Data GovernanceData Contracts
MediumNov 2025

From Models to Machines — Operationalizing AI Innovation

Data EngineeringAI/ML
BCG Enterprise2025-2026

GenAI Adoption Sprint Framework

GenAIChange Management
MediumApr 2026

The Dashboard Isn't Dead — It Just Got a Co-Pilot

AnalyticsAI/LLMsBI Platforms

Industry Domains

Financial ServicesHealthcare/PharmaTelecomOil & GasEnergy/UtilitiesCommodity TradingAutomotiveTechnologyIndustrial Goods
Last updated April 2026