About

Alan Thawley is an experienced Senior Manager of Big Data Engineering at PokerStars with a strong background in providing data engineering and data science solutions for large-scale real-time systems. With over 15 years of relevant experience, Alan has worked extensively as an avionics engineer with a lot of experience in low-level back-end programming. He has also built many machine learning models using R, SparkML, and various Python machine learning libraries. Currently, Alan manages a team of engineers, QA, and DevOps working on an on-premise big data Hadoop cluster in an Agile environment at PokerStars. He maintains a Hortonworks/Cloudera technology stack with over 1.1PB of data to provide real-time streaming, real-time metrics, and real-time data science model predictions. Alan is currently managing the transition from an R&D cluster to an enterprise production system and is proficient in managing the following technologies: Kafka, Flink, Storm, HIVE, HDFS, Java, Airflow, SQOOP, HBase, REDIS, and Spark. In the past, Alan has worked as a Data Scientist and Poker Data Analyst at PokerStars. As a Data Scientist, he worked on a team to create a new big-data cluster as an R&D group. He has extensive experience in Java using Apache Flink and Apache Storm to write real-time stream processors and has built end-to-end solutions that included data analysis, model building/testing, real-time stream processor for real-time predictions, and triggering actions within the system. As a Poker Data Analyst, Alan has extensive experience with Java for real-time stream processing and internal tools development. He has also worked with C#/ASP.net to build a web front-end interface for database reports and has experience in writing SQL Server stored procedures and SSRS reports. Alan holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Dallas, which he completed in 2008. He has a strong tech stack that includes Data Engineering, Big Data, Data Scientist, ML, Apache storm, Hadoop, Kafka, HDFS, Java, Spark, Apache Airflow, QA, Python, Redis, DevOps, Backend, Research Scientist, test, Apache Hive, SQL, dotNET, ASP.NET, Frontend, and Web.