Victor Poonai - Senior Data Engineer

Victor Poonai

Senior Data Engineer

Washington DC-Baltimore Area United States

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Summary

🤩

Rockstar

🎓

Top School

Victor Poonai is a Senior Data Engineer with 11 years of experience building cloud-native, scalable data systems for federal clients, currently driving data engineering at DPRA after a multi-year tenure at Booz Allen Hamilton. He specializes in AWS, PostgreSQL, ETL, and designing self-adapting pipelines and ORM frameworks that processed hundreds of gigabytes daily across petabyte-scale document stores. Victor combines hands-on backend and DevOps skills—Docker networking, FastAPI, CI automation and Linux server administration—with applied ML/NLP support and LLM prototyping for regulatory document analysis. An active open-source contributor, he’s improved container tooling (rkt), SQL parsing in Rust, and performance features in high‑performance databases like Dgraph and Badger, reflecting deep systems and distributed-systems expertise. He has a practical track record of automating workflows to save hundreds of staff hours per month and building reusable testing frameworks that cut QA effort by 75%.

11 years of coding experience

7 years of employment as a software developer

Johns Hopkins University

Bachelors Communications: Public Relations, Bachelors Communications: Public Relations at University of Maryland

Github Skills (58)

asynchronous10

apim10

container10

javascript10

parser10

rkt10

postgresql10

lexer10

scripting10

key-value10

testing10

databases10

bash10

distributed-systems10

wpgraphql10

Programming languages (18)

MDXJavaCSSC++RustCMakefileGo

Github contributions (5)

fossasia/yaydoc

May 2017 - Sep 2017

Docs! Yay!

Role in this project:

DevOps Engineer

Contributions:50 commits, 68 PRs, 3 pushes in 4 months

Contributions summary:Victor primarily focused on automating and streamlining the documentation generation process for the project. They created a generalized script for CI, modified the `generate.sh` script to improve automation and handle errors, and integrated a system for publishing documentation to GitHub Pages. The user also introduced improvements for continuous integration, including the addition of the Heroku deployment link to the email and added support for multiple repositories documentation generation.

documentation-generatoryay

dgraph-io/dgraph

Jul 2019 - Sep 2020

high-performance graph database for real-time use cases

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer & Database Engineer

Contributions:6 reviews, 134 commits, 156 PRs in 1 year 2 months

Contributions summary:Victor primarily contributed to the core functionality and features of the Dgraph database. Their work included implementing improvements to the bulk loader, adding metrics to the query execution, and implementing a helper method to calculate the size of lists. They also addressed a bug related to group deletion and refactored code related to mutations. Additionally, the user added support for subscription to the graphql layer. Their contributions focused on improving the database's performance, features, and integration with GraphQL.

graph-databasedatabasedistributedgoknowledge-graph

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