Data & AI Engineering Leader
Vishnu Bapathi
Data & AI Engineering Leader
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. Recent work spans clinical data modeling for medical devices, AI transformation scoping for global automotive, and GenAI adoption across 70+ engineers — combining deep platform expertise (Databricks, Snowflake, dbt, 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
- Served as Design Authority for a $2.5M medical device data engagement — designed a 16-entity therapy-agnostic dimensional model (dbt/Snowflake) harmonizing 7+ years of clinical data across two therapy lines, reverse-engineered 5 production SQL pipelines (1000+ lines), mapped 82 business metrics to technical specifications, and delivered 5 reporting views replacing manual Excel processes
- Led technical scoping for a greenfield AI transformation across 5 domains (pricing engine, spend analytics, order optimization, quality systems) for a global vehicle manufacturer — created technical effort breakdown, team composition (14–20 resources), and platform architecture (medallion lakehouse, MLOps, dual-ERP bridge for PeopleSoft → S/4HANA migration) that shaped the program proposal
- 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
- Built real-time data pipelines for trade settlement, fund accounting, and investor reporting
- 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 data ingestion and warehouse platforms for healthcare and enterprise clients — healthcare claims analytics, clinical quality reporting, and payer analytics. ETL development (Informatica, SSIS), Tableau/Business Objects reporting, and dimensional modeling
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 modelingDBMLStreamingCDC
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
- 2025
Agentic AI
Harvard Data Science Initiative
- 2024
Climate & Sustainability Foundational: Accelerator
BCG
- 2021
Azure Data Engineer Associate
Microsoft
- 2021
Azure Fundamentals
Microsoft
Publications & Thought Leadership
MediumJul 2026
Groundtruth: Why Semantic Ontology Beats Raw SQL for Enterprise AI
OntologySemantic LayerEnterprise AI
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/PharmaMedical DevicesTelecomOil & GasEnergy/UtilitiesCommodity TradingAutomotiveTechnologyIndustrial Goods
Last updated April 2026