I'm Shafi.
I build with data.

My name is Mahammed Shafi Shaik. I have more than 16 years of professional experience, with a focus on data engineering, distributed systems, and turning complex requirements into dependable platforms.

What I've worked on

Most recently, I worked at Meta across monetization, financial technology, and payments. As a data engineer and technical lead, my work included advertising data platforms, first-party event processing, system health, and payment data modeling.

Earlier, I worked on financial crime analytics at Citi through Capgemini and on data platforms at Sprint through OTSI. Those environments taught me to look beyond a successful job run: definitions, reconciliation, lineage, and operational ownership determine whether people can trust the result.

My engineering focus

I work with SQL, Python, Spark, Kafka, and distributed query systems such as Presto and Trino. My interests include data modeling, pipeline reliability, observability, and practical uses of AI in engineering workflows. I have also built a LangGraph agent for codebase improvement.

I hold a master's degree in Software Systems from BITS Pilani and a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from JNTUH.

Why I publish here

A short answer can tell you what to type. A detailed explanation should help you decide whether to type it at all. depthfirst is where I work through the reasoning: assumptions, failure modes, tradeoffs, and concrete examples.

You'll find long-form articles and guides, hands-on learning tools, and interactive product explorations. Prototypes are identified as demonstrations. Examples illustrate an idea; they are not claims about deployments at a former employer.

Let's compare notes

Have a technical correction, an interesting failure mode, or a question about my work? Email me. Useful feedback makes the next explanation better.