Chapter· Sep 2024 — Jan 2025

Data Engineer
Nielsen

Bangalore, India

2M+

records/day via Kafka + Airflow on

30%

Accelerated ETL via predicate pushdown and

Feature 01

Scaled throughput past 2M/day

I owned the Databricks + Kafka + Airflow ETL on AWS and pushed daily throughput from a stuck 1.6M to over 2M records without growing the cluster.

Feature 02

Killed the skew bottleneck

I diagnosed and fixed the stage-skew bottleneck using broadcast joins, key salting on skewed publishers, and multi-threaded I/O on the slow steps.

Feature 03

30% faster ETL, same budget

I accelerated end-to-end ETL by 30% through predicate pushdown, materialised Parquet snapshots, and a careful cluster rightsizing pass.

What I shipped

Big-data ETL on Databricks for TV audience measurement.

2M+ records/day via Kafka + Airflow on AWS.

Resolved bottleneck via broadcast joins, key salting, multi-threading.

Accelerated ETL 30% via predicate pushdown and rightsizing.