About

Derek Middleton is a highly experienced Data Engineer with over 24 years of relevant experience in the field. He is currently working at Instagram, where he has created and maintained data pipelines to support multiple business- and ad-related product teams. Derek is passionate about automating manual processes to reduce development and support time with a focus on the data warehouse and big data area. Derek has a degree in Computer Science from Michigan State University and has worked with a wide variety of programming languages and software platforms. He has a strong proficiency in Data Engineering, SQL, Data Warehouse, Big Data, Research Scientist, Hadoop, ETL, Senior Software Engineer, Python, and Java. Prior to his current role at Instagram, Derek worked as a Data Engineer at NerdWallet, where he maintained and rewrote large portions of the event ingest framework, created generic frameworks to enrich events, and took ownership of ETL processes. He also worked as a Technical Director at Charles Schwab, where he was responsible for the operations architecture of platforms and processes supporting Business Intelligence. Derek has a proven track record of optimizing SQL generation frameworks to significantly reduce CPU and memory consumption as well as wall-clock execution time. He has also created and hosted training classes to onboard new employees and interns as well as training existing employees in SQL and various internal frameworks and tools. Derek is a computer scientist with a passion for automating manual processes. He is always looking for ways to reduce development and support time while maintaining the highest level of quality. When contacting him, be sure to let him know that you've read his profile by telling him your favorite flavor of ice cream.