Alfonso Manuel Baena González

Platform Engineer · Data Architect

Remote, Spain

About

Platform Engineer with a strong background as Data Architect and Analytics Engineer. Focused on building platform foundations mainly on AWS: GitOps and everything-as-code platform-based fan and strong focus on DevEx and team autonomy. Brings deep data domain knowledge to the platform: Modern Data Stack, Data Mesh and data governance. Experience in leadership, mentoring and strategic business thinking, and lately, a little obsessed with the new agentic "era".

"Always curious, always learning"

Experience

Next Digital Hub

Data Architect - Platform Engineer

2024 - Actual
- Defined data governance for a data platform serving over +150 data engineers and analysts, following data mesh principles.
- Led the decision-making process for the platform’s data governance tool (DataHub, OpenMetadata), including its design, deployment, and implementation on AWS.
- Contributed to defining and adopting the platform's IaC approach with Atlantis for PR-driven Terraform workflows.
- Deployed and operated platform workloads on Kubernetes (EKS) following GitOps with ArgoCD.
- Drove agentic engineering adoption on the platform
- Led proof-of-concepts with new technologies and defined their adoption focusing on cost improvements and transitioning to a modern data stack and serverless approach.
- Created documentation and defined frameworks for batch processing methodologies, following DevOps/GitOps philosophies to ensure developer efficiency and experience.
Next Digital Hub

Senior Data Engineer - Tech Lead

2021 - 2024
- Led a squad of Data Engineers/Analysts.
- Gathered requirements, designed end-to-end data products and collaborated with cross-functional teams.
- Led dbt standardization (structure, testing, TDD, integrations, and deployment) and promoted the adoption.
- ETL/ELT processes using dbt, airflow, AWS (Redshift, S3, EKS, ECS, EMR...) and visualized in PowerBI service.
- Implemented CI/CD pipelines using Gitlab reducing times from minutes to seconds while reducing costs.
- Mentored and participated in the technical selection of data engineers.
- Experience in a 24/7 on-call support team with over 20 critical services from Iberia Data Platform.
Future Connections

Data Engineer

2019 - 2021
- Developed multiple use cases (including geospatial analysis) on T-Mobile's Big Data platform using PySpark/Hive, in addition to python/bash in a non-distributed way.
- Migrated the data orchestration from NiFi to Airflow, including deploying and maintaining the Airflow infrastructure.
- Participated in churn detection and clustering projects using PySpark and MLlib.
- Provided infrastructure, including EC2 and RDS on AWS, for cloud-based data processing.
- Administered and maintained Linux on-premises systems, ELK stack deployment and develop on it (also relational databases, Kibana...).
Dekra

RF Engineer - Trainee

2018 - 2019
- Automated manual processes with Python/Bash and web-scraping.
- Performed software and hardware radiofrequency tests on mobile devices (3G, 4G).