Ben Watson
Data Engineering Tech Lead
Newcastle upon Tyne, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBen Watson is a Data Engineering Tech Lead with 11 years’ experience building and migrating large-scale, cloud-native data platforms across retail, finance and defence sectors. Currently leading Nando’s migration to a Terraformed Google Cloud stack (BigQuery, Dataform, Fivetran, Looker), he combines hands-on Python ingestion work with platform design, automated data governance and monitoring for dozens of daily feeds from 400+ restaurants. Previously he delivered high-throughput Java and Spark pipelines for Discover Financial and architected MapReduce/Kafka-based solutions at Teradata and BAE Systems, solving performance and data-quality problems at scale. He’s comfortable across the full data lifecycle—from discovery and cleansing to CI/CD deployment and operational monitoring—and has led teams and line-managed engineers. Trained in theoretical physics (York) and computer science (Oxford), Ben brings a methodical, analytical approach to practical engineering trade-offs. He’s as likely to be debugging an ETL job at 2 a.m. as he is to present data-driven solutions to restaurant operations.
11 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MSc, Computer Science, Pass, Master of Science - MSc, Computer Science, Pass at University of OxfordBSc, Theoretical Physics, 2.i, BSc, Theoretical Physics, 2.i at University of York
Stackoverflow
5,341reputation
656kreached
207answers
45questions
hadoop
top-1%
apache-spark
top-5%
java
top-5%
decimal
top-5%
apache-kafka
top-5%
number-formatting
top-5%
Github Skills (50)
avro10
intellij10
hadoop10
java10
jekyll10
intellij-plugin10
command-line10
number-formatting9
apache-spark9
gradle9
decimal9
apache-kafka9
parquet9
kotlin8
jetbrains-ides8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
benwatson528/benwatson528.github.io
Nov 2015 - Jul 2024
Build a Jekyll blog in minutes, without touching the command line.
Contributions:4 PRs, 88 pushes, 2 branches in 8 years 9 months
jekyll-blogjekylljekyll-thememinutes
benwatson528/intellij-avro-parquet-plugin
Apr 2019 - Nov 2022
A Tool Window plugin for IntelliJ that displays Avro and Parquet files and their schemas in JSON.
Contributions:118 commits, 117 PRs, 206 pushes in 3 years 7 months
avrointellijparquetintellij-pluginjava
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