Dimensional Modeling Experts

Further Development of the Integrated Capacity Management Platform InKa

Rail Infrastructure

• Power BI shared datasets and reports via DirectQuery on Amazon Redshift (timetable, construction and capacity data)
• Automated report testing with Playwright in Docker containers, version control with GitLab
• Concept and implementation of user communication (information page, changelog, known bugs)

Initial Situation:

The integrated capacity management platform (InKa) is a monitoring and analysis platform for data from timetable and capacity management: customer orders, infrastructure, timetable operations, construction, as well as route capacity and width. The data is stored and linked in a structured data warehouse. This makes it possible to create complex KPIs across different source systems and display current and future route utilization as well as construction activity across the network. The goal is to improve strategic, medium-term and intra-year planning and provide users with easy access to capacity management analyses.

Measures:

• Enablement: Introduction of Power BI with training and workshops for development teams.
• Consulting & Design: Problem analysis, concepts and solution consulting for reporting requirements; implementation of reporting solution plans.
• Data Model: Development of shared datasets with DirectQuery on Amazon Redshift and import tables; DAX measures for utilization and capacity KPIs.
• Development: Data analysis, data transformation and visualization in Power BI; extension and migration of business applications to Power BI; AI-supported development in VS Code with GitHub Copilot.
• Test Automation: Automated testing of Power BI reports with Playwright; setup of the test environment in Docker containers.
• User Communication: Concept and implementation of a central information page with hot news, changelog and known bugs, access from reports with report filters, updates via Power Automate.
• Deployment: Management of Power BI Deployment Pipelines across the DEV, TEST and PROD environments.
• Agile Working: Work in an agile team according to SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework); refinement of user stories and features including effort estimates in Jira; version control with Git and GitLab.
• Quality & Documentation: Reviews for quality assurance, error analysis and resolution, technical documentation in AsciiDoc and Confluence.

Technologies: Power BI, DAX, Power Query, DirectQuery, Amazon Redshift, Git / GitLab, Deployment Pipelines, Playwright, Docker, AsciiDoc, Power Automate, Jira, Confluence, VS Code with GitHub Copilot, SAFe

Results:

• Capacity management KPIs from multiple source systems combined on one platform
• Transparency regarding current and future route utilization and construction activity across the network
• Easy access to analyses for users
• Automated regression testing of Power BI reports
• User communication implemented: central information page with hot news, changelog and known bugs, directly accessible from the reports

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.

• Client — Podimo ApS (podcast & audiobook streaming): build the finance reporting layer on BigQuery + dbt + Airflow, including the core revenue-transaction fact tables used across finance reporting.
• API automation: design and build a BigQuery → Airflow → Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central REST-API pipeline to automate sales-invoice posting, with idempotency and master-data sync between systems.
• Delivery: sole engineer on the engagement — requirements, modelling, orchestration and stakeholder communication with the client finance team, end to end.

• Advising companies on building, migrating and optimising BI and reporting landscapes (Power BI, SQL, Python, ETL)

• 5 client engagements in real estate and finance since 05/2025: taking over and stabilising existing reporting, automating recurring standard and management reports, building cash-flow models

• Proposal and feasibility assessments for BI and reporting projects

• Using AI-assisted development (Claude Code) to accelerate automation, tooling and web/app development

• Custom ERP system

• Problem: A client's core processes ran on scattered, siloed Excel files with no central data storage – error-prone, hard to scale and impossible to analyse end-to-end.

• Approach: Captured the business processes and requirements, modelled the data and developed iteratively together with the business team.

• Implementation: Built a tailored, web-based ERP system with a central database, role-based modules and automated reporting – delivered using AI-assisted development in Claude Code.

• Timesheet app

• Starting point: Time tracking based on an overgrown, macro-heavy Excel template – maintenance-intensive, single-user and error-prone.

• Implementation: Migrated all functionality and VBA macros into a standalone web app with central data storage, multi-user support and automated reporting.

• Cash-flow modelling

• Starting point: The existing cash-flow model covered standing investments only; project developments were missing from steering.

• Implementation: Built and extended the CF model to include project-development cash flows.

• Optimisation: Reviewed and optimised existing CF models and expanded the KPI outputs for reporting and steering.

Specialize in turning complex data from diverse environments into actionable business value through compelling visual storytelling. I am an expert in generating actionable insights and presenting recommendations to business stakeholders. My technical proficiency in SQL, Python, and leading data visualization tools like Tableau and Power BI allows me to deliver a new generation of self-service tools and analytics services.

• Data Visualization & Storytelling: Created impactful data visualizations and dashboards in Tableau and Power BI, effectively communicating findings and presenting actionable recommendations to C-suite stakeholders and business leaders.
• Stakeholder Management: Built effective working relationships with key business stakeholders, data engineers, and other partners to achieve common data-driven goals and targets.
• Insights & Recommendations: Generated actionable insights from complex data analysis for funnel conversion, marketing performance, and ROI, directly influencing business performance and strategy.
• Data Collaboration & Empowerment: Worked closely with cross-functional teams to support the ongoing data needs of internal partners, helping to optimize internal data processes and workflows.
• BI & Data Expertise: Applied extensive experience in data modeling, data collection, data mining, and analysis to deliver end-to-end analytical solutions from stakeholder discovery to production.

Enterprise Analytics Modernization – Germany-based enterprise reporting platform for operations and management analytics, used by 1,000+ internal users across multiple departments.

• Lead end-to-end Power BI and Microsoft Fabric reporting initiatives, delivering scalable dashboards and semantic models supporting daily operational and strategic decisions, achieving 30% faster decision turnaround and 25% reporting efficiency gains.
• Designed unified enterprise datasets using Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse and OneLake, automating historical data processing and reducing manual reporting effort by 40%.
• Built and maintained automated ingestion pipelines using Fabric Dataflows Gen2 and Data Pipelines, improving data refresh reliability to 99.8% uptime and ensuring consistent data quality.
• Implemented enterprise reporting governance, including Row-Level Security (RLS), workspace strategy, deployment pipelines, and documentation, increasing dashboard adoption by 35%.

Technologies used: Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, DAX, Power Query, SQL, Azure Data Fundamentals, Semantic Modeling, RLS, Agile

• Lakehouse build: Designed and built the member & eligibility domain of an Azure Databricks healthcare lakehouse, ingesting SQL Server, file and REST/SFTP sources (JSON, CSV, XML, Parquet) via Azure Data Factory into ADLS Gen2.
• Medallion pipelines: Transformed data through bronze, silver and gold Delta Lake layers with PySpark and Spark SQL; used Delta Live Tables / Lakeflow with built-in expectations for declarative, quality-checked pipelines.
• Platform modernisation: Delivered a SQL Server-to-cloud platform: ADF → ADLS Gen2 → Databricks → dbt Core models → Snowflake → Power BI, replacing legacy reporting with governed analytics.
• Robust ETL: Built metadata-driven, idempotent full, incremental and watermark-driven loads with schema evolution and failure-state handling, improving reliability and re-runnability.
• Data modelling: Designed Kimball star schemas with SCD Type 1 & 2 dimensions; tuned slow queries and pipelines using execution plans.
• Governance & security: Applied Unity Catalog RBAC, lineage and audit logging, with Azure Key Vault secrets and managed identities, to meet HIPAA and GDPR requirements.
• Leadership & mentoring: Led a 6-person team (2 data engineers, 2 analysts, BI developer, QA); mentored engineers, set delivery standards and coordinated with international stakeholders.
• Delivery & AI-assisted work: Ran CI/CD and work tracking in Azure DevOps; built Power BI semantic models with DAX and RLS; used Genie Code, Claude and Copilot to accelerate PySpark/SQL development, DAX and documentation.

Scope: Embedded as FP&A Data & AI Architect within the Finance function of a major European refrigeration manufacturer, leading the transformation of manual, fragmented financial reporting into an automated, governance-driven intelligence platform. Driving the shift from Excel-based controlling to structured data architecture, Power BI analytics, and AI-assisted financial operations.

Financial Data Integrity & ERP Governance

• Initiated and led GL vs. subledger reconciliation investigations, identifying and resolving structural mismatches between General Ledger and subledger data that had gone undetected prior to engagement
• Conducted asset analysis to identify items missing from General Ledger postings, surfacing gaps in fixed asset tracking and period-end completeness
• Validated SAP reports, establishing baseline data quality standards for Finance team consumption
• Established systematic SAP data validation framework ensuring ongoing integrity between ERP postings and downstream reporting outputs

Finance Reporting Transformation

• Designed and implemented a structured Transformation Project approach for converting manual Finance reports into fully automated processes
• Created and owns the Data Reporting Audit Log; a centralized tracking system capturing report owners, stakeholders, data sources, manual effort estimates, and automation opportunity scores across the Finance function
• Mapped the full reporting landscape identifying quick-win automation targets and strategic Power BI migration candidates
• Actively reducing manual Excel and PowerPoint dependency across FP&A workflows; replacing point-in-time snapshots with live, governed data models

Power BI & Analytics Enablement

• Introduced and presented Power BI as the strategic reporting platform to Finance leadership, building internal buy-in for the BI transformation roadmap
• Designed initial Power BI architecture aligned with SAP, Salesforce and Oracle data structures and FP&A reporting requirements
• Established report ownership, governance documentation, and data lineage standards enabling sustainable self-service analytics across the Finance team

Transformation Infrastructure & Collaboration

• Configured and deployed Jira as the transformation project management hub, establishing structured sprint workflows, backlog management, and progress visibility for Finance IT initiatives
• Proposed and initiated a dedicated FP&A Communication & Transformation Hub, a structured cross-functional forum aligning Finance, IT, and business stakeholders around the reporting transformation roadmap
• Positioned the Finance function as an active driver of data governance and digital transformation within the broader organization

Outcomes

• GL/subledger reconciliation gaps identified and investigation framework established within first two weeks of engagement
• Data Reporting Audit Log deployed; first structured inventory of Finance reporting landscape in company history
• Power BI transformation roadmap presented and approved by Finance leadership
• Jira-based project governance live; Finance transformation now tracked with full sprint visibility

Technologies: SAP FI/CO · Power BI · DAX · SQL · Excel (advanced) · Power Query (M) · Power Automate · VBA · Jira · Microsoft 365 · SharePoint · Salesforce (Sales Data) · Oracle HCM · Python

• 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.

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

• Designed and implemented scalable ETL/ELT pipelines using Python, SQL, dbt, AWS and Informatica to ingest data from sources such as APIs, relational databases, and flat files into Snowflake, reducing pipeline runtime by ~30%.
• Migrated high-volume datasets from on-premises Teradata to Snowflake using AWS services (S3, Glue, Step Functions, IAM), ensuring data consistency and integrity.
• Applied Kimball methodology to design star and snowflake schemas, improving query performance and reducing Snowflake compute costs.
• Implemented automated data quality checks using SQL-based dbt tests and the Great Expectations framework to detect anomalies and enforce data correctness before production loads.
• Orchestrated ETL workflows in Airflow using Python and managed code deployments via Git with CI/CD best practices to increase deployment reliability and maintain pipeline uptime.
• Built interactive Power BI dashboards and curated datasets to enable data-driven decision-making for stakeholders.
• Maintained technical documentation in Confluence for ETL workflows, and led knowledge-sharing sessions for new joiners.

• Thesis Title: Designing a Semantic Layer for Enterprise Analytics and AI Integration.
• Designed a semantic layer architecture for enterprise analytics that improved dataset discovery, relationship mapping, and governed access to reporting data.
• Built schema discovery and SQL generation workflows across 400+ data products, translating complex data structures into consumable analytics assets.
• Implemented role-based access control, Row-Level Security, and query validation to ensure data quality, governed access, and reliable use of enterprise reporting datasets.

• Azure Landing Zone architecture: Design and implement a hub-spoke, multi-region-capable Azure landing zone that provides the secure, scalable and highly available foundation for autonomous driving and parking data/ML platforms.
• Compliance through Azure Policy: Enforce security and compliance standards across Azure subscriptions via Azure Policy (guardrails, deny/audit/deploy-if-not-exists), consistently achieving top-tier infrastructure security scores.
• Infrastructure-as-Code: Automate provisioning and configuration of Azure resources with Terraform and Bicep, with changes delivered through reviewed CI/CD pipelines.
• Azure Databricks and Unity Catalog: Extensive experience operating Azure Databricks with Unity Catalog for centralized data governance, access control, lineage and auditing across workspaces.
• Monitoring and observability: Built and run infrastructure monitoring and logging with Azure Monitor, Prometheus, Grafana and Loki, covering platform health, alerting, troubleshooting and capacity trends.
• Platform at scale: Architected and operate cloud data/ML platforms supporting multi-PB vehicle data ingestion and simulation; orchestrate Argo Workflow-based recompute and autolabeling services scaling to 100k+ concurrent pods on AKS.
• Reproducible ML: Established reproducible training environments with dataset versioning and provenance tracking, enabling auditing and experiment reliability.
• Operational excellence: Automated GitHub organization management and CI/CD pipelines, improving developer productivity and deployment reliability; automated recurring operational processes.
• FinOps: Developed transparent resource utilization and cost-tracking for multi-project Azure environments.
• Leadership: Technical lead for infrastructure topics, collaborating with development, DevOps and security teams; technical interviewer and recruitment panel member for scaling the engineering team.

Engaged as an independent BI consultant for a FinTech SaaS platform, building and maintaining the end-to-end Microsoft Azure and Fabric analytics stack behind a multi-tenant accounting product used by business owners to track their own financial performance.

• Partnered with finance stakeholders to translate complex accounting workflows into real-time BI dashboards (P&L, Cash Flow, Balance Sheet), helping 2000+ business owners track cash flow and overall financial health effortlessly.
• Developed 10+ interactive dashboards, giving each business owner personalized, real-time visibility into their own sales performance, accounts receivable aging, and operational costs.
• Enforced strict enterprise data governance by implementing dynamic Row-Level Security (RLS) via DAX to isolate each business owner's data within the shared multi-tenant model.
• Maintained and extended an Azure ELT pipeline (Azure Data Factory, Azure SQL Database, Azure Synapse) that automated data ingestion and transformation.
• Contributed to a team-wide platform migration from Azure to Microsoft Fabric to optimize capacity licensing costs.
• Designed and implemented a Microsoft Fabric ELT pipeline (Lakehouse, Pipelines, PySpark) that automated data ingestion and transformation, replacing the prior Azure pipeline.
• Modeled cleansed data into a Star Schema within the data warehouse using T-SQL, powering the Power BI Semantic Model.
• Leveraged AI tools, including Copilot and Claude, as development partners across the entire ELT pipeline, from data ingestion to KPI reporting and visualization.
• Supported agile delivery processes, using Jira to track development tasks and Confluence to maintain technical and project documentation.