Aaron Nelson
Senior Data Engineer
Alpharetta, Georgia, United States
Summary
👤
SeniorAaron Nelson is a senior data engineer and architect with two decades of deep experience designing and optimizing SQL Server and modern data platforms, now leading data engineering for Microsoft's Cloud Operations and Innovation organization. He architected a metadata-driven, data-source-agnostic platform that converted hundreds of manually maintained pipelines into auto-generated pipelines—cutting onboarding time from days to hours and materially reducing infrastructure costs. An 8x Microsoft Data Platform MVP and long-time PowerShell advocate, he contributes to high-profile open-source projects such as dbatools and Microsoft’s ReportingServicesTools and sql-server-samples, improving automation, documentation, and reliability. Aaron blends hands-on performance tuning and BI expertise with cross-organizational leadership, coaching teams to own scalable, automated solutions. Based in Alpharetta, GA, he’s known for pragmatic, metadata-first approaches and a knack for turning complex distributed data estates into maintainable, cost-effective analytics platforms.
10 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Spanish, t-sql, powershell
Github Skills (22)
notebook10
jupyter10
scripting10
technical-writing10
databases10
database-administration10
jupyterlab10
sql-server10
sql10
powershell10
jupyter-notebook10
jupyter-book10
documentation10
database10
migration9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
microsoft/ReportingServicesTools
Feb 2017 - May 2021
Reporting Services Powershell Tools
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:14 reviews, 90 commits, 28 PRs in 4 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Aaron primarily contributed to the Reporting Services PowerShell Tools, focusing on enhancing and refining existing functionality. They corrected misleading help documentation within the `Remove-RsCatalogItem.ps1` script. The user added support for pipelining and examples, and modified the command output to be less verbose. Further improvements include renaming a core function, implementing support for pipelining, and other minor code changes to improve the command.
powershell
dataplat/dbatools
Jul 2016 - Mar 2017
🚀 SQL Server automation and instance migrations have never been safer, faster or freer
Role in this project:Database Engineer / Database Administrator
Database Engineer / Database AdministratorContributions:12 commits, 3 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Aaron's contributions primarily involve modifications and additions to PowerShell scripts within the `dbatools` repository. Their work centers on the `Copy-SqlDatabase` function, enhancing its functionality with features such as file structure inventory, and handling of file stream enabled databases, as well as availability groups. They also worked on `Show-SqlWhoIsActive` by adding warnings to deploy to master databases. Furthermore, they have also contributed to index unused indices.
automationsql-serverpowershelldatabase-administrationmigrations
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.