I’m Long Nguyen, a senior data engineer who builds production-grade pipelines, lakehouses, and ML infrastructure for teams that can’t afford it to break. Ten years in, hundreds of millions of rows shipped daily.
Built with the boring, battle-tested stack
Selected work · 2018 — 2026
Names redacted under NDA. Happy to walk through specifics on a call.
Fortune 500 retailer
Re-architected a brittle Airflow + EMR pipeline into an incremental Spark + dbt lakehouse on Databricks. Same dashboards, fraction of the spend, finance team gets numbers before standup.
Series-B fintech
Designed a Kafka → Flink → Feature Store pipeline serving fraud models at the edge of the payment flow. Replaced 2 vendor tools, paid for itself in the first quarter.
AI-native SaaS
Bootstrapped feature pipelines, training infra, model registry, and online inference on GCP for a 30-person product team. From zero to first model in production in under a quarter.
Healthcare scale-up
Built a fully audited lakehouse on Snowflake with row-level security, lineage, and CDC ingestion from 14 source systems. Passed SOC 2 + HIPAA review on first attempt.
How I work
End-to-end lakehouse and pipeline architecture — from source systems to dashboards your CFO actually trusts.
Feature stores, training infra, online inference. The boring plumbing that makes data scientists look brilliant.
Inherited a 9-hour batch that fails twice a week? I’ve seen this movie. I know how it ends.
Embed as your interim head of data. Hire the team, set the roadmap, ship the first quarter, hand it off.
Engagement model
30 minutes. We talk about what's broken, what you've tried, and what success looks like by quarter end.
Within 48 hours: a written scope, fixed-fee pricing, milestones, and an exit ramp. No surprises.
Async-first, weekly demos, your team in the loop. Code, infra, and docs land in your repos — never mine.
Runbooks, on-call docs, an internal demo. Optional retainer if you want me on call for the first quarter.
About
Long Nguyen
Senior data engineer · Remote (UTC−5)
For the last decade I’ve been the person teams call when their data systems start lying to the business — pipelines that silently drop rows, dashboards that disagree with the warehouse, ML models retraining on data that no longer exists.
I’ve shipped data infrastructure at Fortune 500 retailers, Series-B fintechs, and AI-native SaaS teams. I write Python and SQL like first languages, lean toward boring tech, and care more about whether the on-call engineer can sleep at night than which framework won this quarter.
I’m booked a quarter ahead, take a maximum of two clients at a time, and price by the engagement, never the hour.
What clients say
“Long parachuted into a tangled lakehouse migration that two prior consultancies had failed to land. Eight weeks later, we were on schedule and under budget. Worth every dollar.”
VP Engineering
Series-B Fintech
“The most senior data engineer I’ve worked with — and the rare contractor who writes documentation his replacement actually wants to read. We’ve hired him three times.”
Chief Technology Officer
Healthcare scale-up
“He delivered a feature store, a real-time inference layer, and a dashboard our exec team uses daily — in a single quarter. Quietly, without drama.”
Head of Data
AI-native SaaS
Common questions
Most engagements land between $25k and $120k, fixed-fee, scoped to a clear deliverable. Retainers start at $8k/month for a half-day per week. I never bill hourly — you should know exactly what you’re paying before we start.
I’m typically booked 4 — 8 weeks ahead and take a maximum of two concurrent clients. The intro call is the fastest way to find out my next available slot.
Yes to all three. Your code lives in your repos under your accounts from day one. I’m comfortable with SOC 2, HIPAA, and PCI environments and have signed plenty of MNDAs.
Both, but rescue work is where I’m sharpest — inherited Airflow nightmares, dbt projects nobody owns, lakehouses that cost more than they earn. I prefer incremental refactors over big-bang rewrites.
I work solo by default. For larger builds I have a small bench of trusted contractors I can pull in — also senior, also remote, also fixed-fee.
I’m on US Eastern (UTC−5) and overlap comfortably with North America, EU, and APAC mornings. Async-first by default, with one weekly sync.
Let’s talk
Book a free 30-minute call. Bring the messiest pipeline you have. We’ll either rough out a plan together or I’ll point you to someone better suited.
Replying within 24 hours · Mon — Fri