Open to Senior DE / Cloud DBA roles — Remote & Bay Area

Usha Kale
Azure Data Engineer
& Cloud DBA

Building secure, scalable data platforms for banking and financial services

15+
Years in Banking
250+
SQL Server Instances
2.26M
Rows in Lakehouse
3
Azure Certifications
AZ-104 DP-300 AZ-305 San Ramon, CA

What I have built

Production-grade data engineering projects built on Azure, Databricks, and the Claude API — all validated end-to-end in lab and cloud environments.

SQLMigratePlus
AI Migration Agent · v0.9

End-to-end AI agent automating SQL Server-to-Azure migrations across 5 stages: Assess → Decide → Migrate → Handoff → Day-to-Day Ops. Built with Claude API, PowerShell ReAct loop, and anti-hallucination grounding. The only migration tool with an automated Handoff stage that generates connection strings and migration receipts for app teams.

5
Stages
11
Excel sheets TCO
2
Migration paths
Claude API PowerShell Terraform Azure CLI SQL Server
🏦
Banking Lakehouse Sprint
Databricks · Unity Catalog · June 2026

End-to-end Banking Lakehouse on Databricks Free Edition — 2.26M Lending Club consumer loans and 962K HMDA California mortgage applications. Full Bronze/Silver/Gold medallion architecture with Unity Catalog governance, Delta Lake CDC, time travel, Lakeflow Jobs orchestration, and Claude API AI risk narrative generation.

2.26M
Loan records
11
Notebooks
2m39s
Full pipeline
Databricks PySpark Delta Lake Unity Catalog Claude API
🔄
ADF Medallion Pipeline
Azure Data Factory · 8 POCs

End-to-end Medallion Architecture on Azure Data Factory — Bronze/Silver/Gold layers on ADLS Gen2, SHIR ingestion from on-premises SQL Server, Mapping Data Flows, Key Vault Managed Identity, SOX audit trail, ForEach orchestration, GitHub CI/CD, and Azure Monitor alerting. Fully validated across 8 POCs.

8
POCs built
25M+
Rows processed
3
Layer medallion
ADF ADLS Gen2 SHIR Key Vault GitHub CI/CD
☁️
SQL Server → Azure Migration
DMS · LRS · Azure Migrate

Migrated 14 banking databases to Azure SQL Managed Instance via DMS with zero data loss. Separately migrated 141,050 rows via Log Replay Service with 100% row count parity. Deployed SSISDB on MI and validated SSIS package execution via Azure-SSIS IR. Azure Migrate assessment showing 87% PaaS readiness and $60K annual savings.

14
DBs migrated
141K
Rows via LRS
$60K
Annual savings
Azure SQL MI DMS LRS SSIS Azure Migrate

What the data revealed

Real findings from the Banking Lakehouse sprint — demonstrating data engineering skills alongside banking domain knowledge.

57.6%
Grade G borrower default rate despite 27.49% average interest rates — suggesting pricing model underestimates actual credit risk
Source: Lending Club 2007-2018 · 2.26M records
55%
California home improvement loan applications denied in 2023 — potential fair lending pattern under HMDA regulatory requirements
Source: HMDA California 2023 · 962K applications
$28M
Grade A borrower defaults despite 7.14% interest rates and 18.16% DTI — flagged as potential grade migration risk or systematic underwriting gap
Source: Lending Club Gold layer analysis

Tech stack

15 years of production SQL Server DBA experience combined with modern Azure Data Engineering and AI capabilities.

Databricks & Delta Lake
  • PySpark notebooks & Lakeflow Jobs
  • Unity Catalog governance
  • Delta Lake CDC & time travel
  • Streaming with AvailableNow trigger
  • AI/BI dashboards
Azure Data Factory
  • Mapping Data Flows (Bronze/Silver/Gold)
  • Self-Hosted Integration Runtime
  • Key Vault Managed Identity
  • ForEach & Master/Branch patterns
  • GitHub CI/CD & Azure Monitor
SQL Server & Azure SQL
  • Always On Availability Groups
  • Azure SQL Managed Instance
  • DMS, LRS, Azure Migrate
  • Performance tuning & DMVs
  • TDE, backup encryption, RBAC
AI & Automation
  • Claude API tool-use agent
  • PowerShell ReAct loop
  • Anti-hallucination grounding
  • Terraform IaC provisioning
  • Prompt versioning & cost tracking
Compliance & Security
  • PCI DSS, SOX, FFIEC, HIPAA
  • Append-only audit logs
  • Dynamic Data Masking
  • Service account governance
  • Azure Key Vault secrets management
Cloud & DevOps
  • Azure VM, ADLS Gen2, Storage
  • GitHub source control & CI/CD
  • PowerShell & dbatools automation
  • AWS RDS, EC2, CloudFormation
  • Azure Monitor & Log Analytics KQL

Certifications

Microsoft Azure certified with active pursuit of Fabric and AI engineering credentials.

🏅
AZ-104
Azure Administrator Associate
Held
🏅
DP-300
Azure Database Administrator Associate
Held
🏅
AZ-305
Azure Solutions Architect Expert
Held
🎯
DP-700
Fabric Data Engineer Associate
In Progress
🎯
DP-600
Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate
In Progress
🎯
AI-103
Azure AI Engineer Associate
In Progress

Open to opportunities

Senior Azure Data Engineer and Cloud DBA roles in banking and financial services. Open to full-time and contract. Remote and Bay Area hybrid.