Niraj Zade
Senior Data Engineer | Consultant

I help companies build centralized data lakehouses to unlock AI, Data Science & Data Driven Business Decisions - by gathering and unifying data from disparate sources (APIs, databases, tools etc).

All this while not breaking the bank.

I'm an extremely high-agency person, who has spent over a decade solving problems through software. 4 years of it within tech companies. A term that describes me, which you might know is manager of one.

Tech I most frequently work with: pySpark, Databricks, Azure (and also AWS), FastAPI, Python, SQL etc


Companies I've worked for include:

   

Contact

Email: niraj[at]theniraj[dot]com
LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/nirajzade/

I simply enjoy computers. A LOT. Way too much actually.
If computing wasn't a career - I'd be doing some other job in the day, and be glued to computers at the night.
Haven't found any other line of work that's so (frustratingly) loveable. I'm glad that the world has a path to use software engineering for solving its problems.


Blog posts


Articles

I learn through writing. Most of these are ever evolving pieces.


data engineering

Spark Microbook
2025 Oct 16 | 28m (5199 words)

Spark join strategies
2024 Jan 22 | 13m (2442 words)

Spark performance optimization compendium
2025 Oct 11 | 7m (1359 words)


python

Python gotchas compilation
2023 Sep 17 | 5m (1058 words)

Unicode string normalization schemes in Python
2024 May 06 | 7m (1303 words)


resources

Links collection
2025 Jun 15 | 3m (630 words)

Papers, books, talks etc
2025 Jun 02 | 4m (744 words)


software engineering

Handy git commands
2023 Sep 17 | 1m (231 words)


sqlserver

SqlServer reference - All date & time formatters
2025 Jul 10 | 2m (519 words)


work

Lecture - You and your research by Dr. Richard Hamming
2024 Oct 14 | 1hr18m (14441 words)

Why charge more as an engineer
2025 Oct 13 | 6m (1252 words)


© Niraj Zade 2026 - Website, Linkedin
Website was autogenerated on 08 Apr 2026
Whoever owns storage, owns computing


The font used is Basier Square. Love this font.
This website is auto-generated by a nightly chron job that runs a python script, which checks my obsidian markdown files and re-generates the pages if changes are detected, and commits them to git. The website is then auto-deployed by a brainless CI-CD setup. Currently hosted on cloudflare pages.
I just write my markdown files. The website takes care of itself.