Apache Spark Experts
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Meet FRATCH Experts who have recently used Apache Spark
Peter Schillen
Last position:
Senior ML Engineer & AI Researcher at Anonymous client
Project: Defect generation on inspection images of metal surfaces
Environment:* Automated Visual Inspection (AVI), Metallurgy & Manufacturing
Goal & implementation: Concept, architecture, and training of Generative Adversarial Networks (Pix2PixHD / SPADE) for image-to-image transformation. Targeted generation of synthetic material defects (e.g. cracks, inclusions, scale) on rough metal surfaces under real inspection-light conditions for privacy-compliant and efficient dataset expansion (Data Augmentation).
Technical design: Implementation of robust Generative AI and Computer Vision pipelines in Python and PyTorch. Use of semantic segmentation approaches for mask-guided defect synthesis and downstream evaluation with EfficientDet object detection models.
Business impact: Massive dataset upscaling (factor of 10x) without time- and cost-intensive physical inspection runs, while at the same time drastically improving the detection performance of automated inspection systems.
Technologies & skills used: Python | PyTorch | SPADE | Pix2PixHD | EfficientDet | Machine Learning | Semantic Segmentation | Computer Vision
Jens Henneberg
Last position:
Interim CTO (occasional assignments) at Fujitsu / FSAS
Stabilizing an Azure/.NET landscape in live operation.
- Architecture, DevOps, and operational readiness; technical decisions under time pressure
- Azure DevOps, monitoring, ETL/ELT, cloud security, FinOps, and data-mesh-related topics
Technologies: Azure DevOps, .NET, CI/CD, monitoring, FinOps
Fadi Shoaa
Last position:
Development of a production-ready Enterprise Document AI & Recommendation Platform at Freelancer
- Development of a production-ready Enterprise AI solution for the automated processing of invoices and business documents
- Integration of Azure AI Document Intelligence and LLM technologies into existing business processes
- Development of robust REST APIs for automated document processing and system integration
- Extraction, validation, and storage of structured invoice data in Azure SQL as a base for analytics and machine learning models
- Development of an AI-based recommendation engine with machine learning and deep learning to generate personalized product recommendations based on historical purchase data
- Implementation of logging, monitoring, error handling, and validation mechanisms for stable production use
- Collaboration with business teams to define business rules and integrate the solution into existing enterprise processes
Technologies: Python, Azure AI Document Intelligence, Azure OpenAI, Azure SQL Database, REST APIs, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, OCR, Pandas, JSON, Workflow Automation
Michael Nelz
Last position:
Senior AI Engineer | Forward Deployed Engineer at Tiefbau
- Development of an AI-powered project organization tool for a civil engineering company that intelligently links project, task, tender, schedule, and document data through a knowledge graph.
- Implementation of AI features for document analysis, information extraction, context-based assistance, and voice-based data capture based on Microsoft Azure AI, reducing administrative effort, making information available faster, and supporting project teams in decision-making.
- Tech stack: Python, React, TypeScript, FastAPI, Claude Code, Codex, Graphify, PostgreSQL, Microsoft Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Speech, Azure AI Document Intelligence, Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Entra ID, Docker, Git, CI/CD.
Karin Albiez
Last position:
AI Benchmark Engineer | Native language specialist German at Lilt
- Task Engineering: Evaluating Coding Agents.
- Asset Creation: Building realistic task environments using datasets and files in German. Crucially, these assets must remain in the target language to genuinely measure multilingual handling.
- Prompting & Translation: finding failure points where AI does not work, in German.
- Implementation & Verification: Supporting the development of robust solutions (reference implementations) and write highly reliable, deterministic verifier scripts (using rubric-based judging only when strictly necessary).
- Calibration & Execution: Analyze execution logs and calibrate task difficulty (Easy to Very Hard) using standard Terminal-Bench run configurations against various model tiers (Haiku, Opus).
- Quality Assurance: Participation in a rigorous, 4-layer human quality control process (creation, human review, calibration review, and audit) alongside automated LLM-based checks to ensure fairness, grammatical accuracy, and benchmark integrity.
- Linguistic Review: Reviewing AI benchmark tasks across Hindi, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Czech and Turkish.
Umut GĂĽlac
Last position:
Data Architect at BA Technology
I am an experienced data engineer specializing in end‑to‑end data integration, cloud DWH architectures, and high‑quality, governed data products.
I delivered following projects and engagements as a freelancer.
- Data Migration of CRM System for AL-FA Objekt Service Gmbh
- Microsoft Software Resales Partnership
I am looking for freelance roles like: Freelance Data Engineer Cloud Data Warehouse Architect Data Modeling & Architecture Consultant MDM & Data Governance Specialist BI & Analytics Developer
Technical Focus Areas
- Data Engineering & Integration: SQL Server/SSIS, Informatica PowerCenter/IDQ, Talend, Kafka, Azure Data Factory – Delta/CDC/ELT patterns, robust pipelines, monitoring/recovery, data lineage & impact analysis, medallion architecture Bronze/Silver/Gold layers
- DWH & Cloud: Azure SQL / Data Lake / Synapse, AWS Redshift/S3, on‑prem SQL/Oracle – scalable data marts with a strong cost/benefit focus.
- Data Modeling: Atomic (Inmon) and Dimensional (Kimball), Data Vault (Linstedt), Domain‑Driven Design, clear lineage & contracts.
- MDM & Governance: Informatica MDM, IBM MDM, stewardship processes, data quality rules, survivorship/XREF, catalog/glossary, SIF/BES/REST publication.
- Analytics/BI: Power BI, SSAS, Cognos – business‑ready, maintainable data products.
Ajay Kumar Deekonda
Last position:
Senior BI and Analytics Engineer at Novartis
- Led enterprise reporting modernization by migrating legacy SSRS reporting solutions to Power BI, supporting 500+ business users while ensuring full GDPR/DSGVO compliance.
- Designed and optimized Power BI and Microsoft Fabric semantic models using star schema, dimensional modeling, advanced DAX, and performance optimization techniques, reducing query latency by 25%.
- Delivered 20+ executive and operational dashboards featuring KPI scorecards, drill-through, bookmarks, and row-level security, improving reporting efficiency by 20%.
- Enabled self-service analytics through governed Power BI datasets, dataflows, and gateway architecture, increasing business-led reporting adoption by 35%.
- Configured an incremental refresh policy and query folding for a 50+ million row sales dataset, reducing daily report refresh times by 85%.
- Deployed automated ETL/ELT pipelines using Azure Data Factory, Microsoft Fabric, and Snowflake, reducing reporting delivery timelines by 40% through workflow automation.
- Spearheaded Microsoft Fabric analytics modernization initiatives including lakehouse architecture, OneLake integration, and centralized data platform development, reducing data latency from 2 hours to 20 minutes.
- Translated business requirements from 15+ stakeholders into scalable Power BI semantic models and dashboards, improving reporting consistency and reducing ad-hoc reporting requests by 25%.
- Applied Microsoft Copilot and generative AI tools to accelerate SQL development, DAX authoring, technical documentation, and testing activities, reducing development effort by approximately 15 hours per week.
Hervé Teguim
Last position:
Senior Data Engineer at Schweizerische Post AG
Tools: Fabric, AWS, dbt, Power BI, SQL, DWH, R, Python
- Supported customers in implementing an architecture design for extracting and preparing data
- Planned the design and implementation of the BI and DWH platform
- Ensured the scalability and performance of the data platform
Alexander Zhirov
Last position:
Senior Data Solutions Engineer at VMware Inc.
- Architected and deployed private cloud data platform on VMware vSphere, integrating Greenplum MPP, Apache Kafka, Kubernetes, and Apache Solr, and developed real-time ingestion pipelines with Kafka Connect and Schema Registry.
- Led Oracle Exadata to Greenplum migration, rearchitected data models, optimized storage, implemented RabbitMQ with Debezium for CDC, and deployed VectorDB for Generative AI.
- Designed and executed multi-cloud migration PoC across AWS, Azure, and GCP, defined KPIs for throughput, latency, and cost efficiency, executed bulk data transfers, validated analytics and streaming workloads, and delivered full-scale architecture recommendations.
- Assessed legacy on-premises infrastructure and designed modern cloud-native data platforms using Greenplum and containerized microservices, advising on scalability, disaster recovery, and high-availability.
Tamás Eppel
Last position:
Senior Software Developer / Tech Lead at NDA (defense / OSINT)
- Designing the audit logging framework
- Implementing APIs for developers to integrate in their codebase
- Implementing ingestion pipeline, database query layer and UI for browsing the audit events
- Improving stability and reliability of the backend system
Philipp Grunert
Last position:
Data Scientist & ML Engineer at Data-Science Factory GmbH
- Building, implementing and selling automated Data Science solutions such as Scorecard Factory and Forecast Factory
- Implementation of automated end-to-end cloud processes
- Development of LLM and NLP models
- Creation of interactive reports
- Support for national and international large corporations as well as medium-sized companies in implementing ML projects
Ajay Chodankar
Last position:
Software Engineer & Cloud AI Developer at TANGILITY GmbH
Built Python-based AI microservices and integrations for an AEC/VR Unity-based SaaS app, focusing on LLM/VLM capabilities, retrieval-backed systems, RESTful APIs, containerized deployment, and an automation microservice for the CAD-to-Unity pipeline.
- Developed a custom Hybrid A* based algorithm in C# to simulate hospital scenarios and detect early-stage design conflicts from collision/spatial data and generate structured reports.
- Solved and automated the time-consuming problem of converting CAD files to usable Unity environments with a custom-engineered and real-time pipeline using a ZeroMQ-based communication layer to distribute workloads across multiple processes and achieve real-time performance.
- Built a Dockerized FastAPI pipeline for CAD-to-Unity automation, combining vision-based object matching, image embeddings, and precomputed metadata to automatically map CAD objects to Unity behavior scripts, assign properties, and reduce repeated AI inference calls.
- Created documentation and examples to help technical users understand, configure, and extend the AI automation pipeline.
Alexander Bromberg
Last position:
Senior Data Engineer at RWE AG
Architected and maintained data products for renewable energy operations, covering wind turbine, grid-meter, and weather data. Built scalable ETL/ELT pipelines in Azure Databricks using Delta Lake (bronze/silver/gold layers) and processed data in various formats, including structured and semi-structured data. Contributed to a data quality framework supporting table and column documentation, outlier detection, and completeness metrics across all datasets within a data product. In addition, implemented a DORA KPI Databricks dashboard used across all data products. Optimized CI/CD processes in Azure DevOps to streamline deployment across development, test, and production environments.
Technology stack: Azure Databricks, PySpark, SQL, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Azure Data Lake, APIs, Dremio, Azure DevOps, YAML, Git, Databricks Workflows, Application Insights, Terraform, OpenAI API, Codex, LLM-assisted workflows
Samuel Kopp
Last position:
Founder & Agentic AI Engineer at Agentakt LLC
Independent engineering practice focused on custom AI systems, production delivery, and fractional technical leadership.
Selected client engagement: Scalutions
Role: Serve as fractional CTO and hands-on technical lead, responsible for the architecture and agentic infrastructure behind its managed B2B outbound operation.
Product: Designed and built OutboundLoop, an agentic SDR operating system for research, qualification, personalized outreach, campaign management, human approvals, measurement, and continuous improvement.
Scope: Own the full system lifecycle—from business processes and agent behavior to context design, model routing, integrations, evaluation, telemetry, reliability, cost control, and production operations.
Prasad Tilloo
Last position:
Solution Architect / Senior Manager – DTC E-Commerce Platform at BRITA
- Led discovery phase and POC for Shopware to Shopify Plus migration across EMEA markets, evaluating platform suitability, technical architecture, and multi-brand/multi-country capabilities against business requirements.
- Designed reference architecture for Shopify Plus implementation incorporating headless front-end patterns (Vue.js, Nuxt.js), CMS integration (Magnolia), and Azure middleware (APIM, Functions, Logic Apps, Service Bus) for 11 EMEA markets.
- Defined migration strategy analyzing data mapping, cutover approach, and zero-downtime deployment patterns using Varnish caching, GitOps pipelines, and CI/CD orchestration across six vendor teams.
- Architected multi-tenant Shopify Plus governance model with centralized admin, localized storefront customization, and compliance controls (GDPR, data residency).
- Prototyped AI-driven search optimization (LLM.txt, JSON-LD) for product discoverability in Google AI results, demonstrating post-launch performance opportunities.
- Defined EMEA expansion roadmap for 15+ markets through C-level strategic workshops, identifying phased rollout, market-specific configurations, and resource requirements.
- Tech Stack: React, Nuxt.js, Vue.js, Magnolia CMS, Shopware, Shopify Plus, Azure (APIM, Functions, Logic Apps, Service Bus, Front Door), Varnish, SAP, MS Dynamics, Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, PostgreSQL, Kafka
Discover over 15,000 top freelancers
Statistics of experts using Apache Spark
Aggregated from the professional profiles of matched freelancers.
Experience
14 years
Position duration
2.7 years
Positions per freelancer
10
Top business areas
Information Technology, Business Intelligence, Product Development
Top industries
Information Technology, Banking and Finance, Automotive
Certification focus areas
Information Technology, Business Intelligence, Research and Development
Bachelor's degree or higher
97%
Master's degree or higher
71%
Doctorate
13%
Certifications per freelancer
3
Most common languages
English, German, French
Speak two or more languages
97%
Based on our profile pool as of 6 Sep 2026.
Daily rate distribution
The chart shows how the daily rates of freelancers in this technology are distributed, based on recent contracts on our platform. Each bar covers a rate range — its height shows how many freelancers charge within that range.
Average rates of experts using Apache Spark
Rates are based on recent contracts and do not include FRATCH margin.
The average daily rate is the mean of all daily rates from recent contracts of comparable freelancers on our platform.
The median daily rate is the middle value of all daily rates — half of comparable freelancers charge less, half charge more. Unlike the average, it is barely affected by outliers.
Calculated based on our freelancers’ daily rates as of 6 Sep 2026. Actual rates may vary depending on seniority level, experience, skill specialization, project complexity, and engagement length.
About the technology
Spark basics
Apache Spark is a distributed engine for large-scale data processing. Companies use it to transform raw files, run SQL analytics, stream events, and train data-heavy models. It fits teams that need fast processing across clusters without rewriting every workflow by hand.
Typical work
- Batch ETL and ELT pipelines
- Streaming jobs with structured streaming
- Data cleanup, joins, and aggregations
- Spark SQL reporting layers
- Feature preparation for machine learning
Ecosystem fit
Spark often sits with Hadoop, Kafka, Delta Lake, Hive, and cloud object storage. Strong specialists know how Spark reads from these systems, writes clean outputs, and handles partitioning, shuffle behavior, and file formats like Parquet and Avro.
When to bring in experts
Companies call for freelance help when jobs are slow, unstable, or expensive to run. They also need extra support for migrations from legacy Hadoop jobs, cloud moves, or a rushed analytics release. In those cases, a specialist can review code, fix bottlenecks, and hand over a clearer pipeline.
What strong specialists do
A strong Apache Spark specialist writes clear transformations, manages memory use, and avoids wasteful shuffles. They understand Spark SQL, DataFrames, cluster sizing, and how to debug failed tasks, skewed joins, and bad reads from external storage.
Signals you need help
- Spark jobs fail under real data volume
- Costs rise because clusters are oversized
- Streaming latency keeps slipping
- SQL logic is hard to maintain
- Your team needs a cleaner handover
Frequently asked questions
Curious about Apache Spark? Here are the answers that come up again and again.
Apache Spark is used for batch processing, streaming, and large-scale data transformation. Companies use it to clean raw data, join many sources, build reporting tables, and prepare inputs for analytics or machine learning. It is a good fit when one machine is not enough and the work must run across a cluster.
Spark is usually faster and more flexible than classic MapReduce-style Hadoop jobs because it keeps more work in memory. Compared with plain SQL tools, it goes further because it can combine ETL, streaming, and machine learning in one system. Teams often use Spark when they need both scale and a programming model beyond basic queries.
A strong Apache Spark specialist usually knows SQL, Python or Scala, and one or more storage layers such as Delta Lake, Parquet, Hive, or cloud buckets. Kafka is also common for event streams. Good specialists also understand cluster tuning, data modeling, and how to read Spark plans and logs.
A small reporting or transformation task may only need someone who knows Spark well and can work cleanly in an existing codebase. A migration, streaming system, or high-volume pipeline needs deeper experience with joins, partitioning, memory use, and failure handling. The harder the data shape and runtime behavior, the more valuable a seasoned specialist becomes.
Bring in Apache Spark expertise when delivery is blocked by slow jobs, hard-to-diagnose errors, or a migration that needs focused attention. Freelancers are also useful when your team needs short-term help for a cloud move, a one-off pipeline rebuild, or a code review before release. They can add depth without changing the whole team structure.
Most Spark work can be done remotely because the important parts are code, cluster settings, and data access. On-site time only helps when the team needs close workshop sessions, access review, or fast alignment with platform owners. Many companies use a hybrid setup for the first review and then continue online.
Look for clear reasoning, not just tool names. A strong Apache Spark freelancer can explain why a job is slow, how they would reduce shuffles, and what they would change in the data layout or query plan. Good signs are clean code, practical trade-offs, and a handover that your team can maintain.
In Spark, Spark SQL is the query layer, DataFrames are the structured programming API, and structured streaming handles continuous data. A good specialist knows when to use each one and how they connect in the same pipeline. That matters when one project mixes batch tables with near-real-time feeds.
The average hourly rate of freelancers who have used Apache Spark in their recent projects is 93 €, which corresponds to a daily rate of about 741 € based on an 8-hour working day.
Of the freelancers who have used Apache Spark in their recent projects, 97% hold at least a Bachelor's degree, 71% hold at least a Master's degree, and 13% hold a doctorate.
On average, freelancers who have used Apache Spark in their recent projects have 14 years of professional experience, with a single engagement typically lasting around 2.7 years.
The most common languages among freelancers who have used Apache Spark in their recent projects are English (98%), German (97%), and French (20%).
The most common industries among freelancers who have used Apache Spark in their recent projects are Information Technology (91%), Banking and Finance (47%), and Automotive (43%).
The most common business areas among freelancers who have used Apache Spark in their recent projects are Information Technology (97%), Business Intelligence (85%), and Product Development (79%).
Main locations of FRATCH Experts, who have recently used Apache Spark
Our freelancers and interim experts are at home across the DACH region — available on-site in the major business hubs or fully remote. Choose a location to discover matched specialists, local market insights and up-to-date availability.
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