Data Architecture & Governance
Enterprise data strategy, governance frameworks, Lakehouse and medallion architecture, data modelling, metadata management, schema evolution, compliance, privacy, data quality.
About me
J Alberto
Suarez C
Solution Architect & Data Specialist — Brisbane, Australia.
Bio
I've spent 15+ years building the unglamorous layer that everything else depends on: the databases, pipelines and governance that decide whether an organisation can trust its own numbers.
That path started in Bogotá as an Oracle specialist at IBM, ran through INDRA in Spain and DIRECTV LATAM, then eight years at the University of Otago in New Zealand where I co-developed a three-year enterprise data strategy. Today I lead data architecture and governance at Queensland University of Technology, and run Let's Data Talk — an AI-powered registration and compliance platform for football clubs across Australia and New Zealand.
I care about systems that are still maintainable three years after the consultants leave. That usually means fewer moving parts, clearer contracts between layers, and documentation someone will actually read at 3am.
Career
Twenty years, four countries.
- 2025 —
Founder / Independent Consultant
Let's Data Talk — Brisbane, Australia
- 2023 —
Application & Database Administrator
Queensland University of Technology — Brisbane, Australia
- 2022–23
Senior Database Engineer
Fronde — Wellington, New Zealand
- 2018–20
Architect Cloud Data Advisor
Xertify Inc
- 2014–22
Data Management Engineer
University of Otago — Dunedin, New Zealand
- 2012–14
Database Architect
DIRECTV LATAM
- 2011–12
Oracle Database Consultant
Asesoftware — Colombia
- 2009–10
Oracle Database Specialist
INDRA — Spain
- 2007–09
Oracle Database Specialist
IBM — Colombia
- 2006–07
Support & Infrastructure Engineer
Axesnet — Colombia
Skills
Capability grid.
Databricks & Lakehouse
Databricks Lakeflow, Spark Declarative Pipelines, PySpark, Auto Loader / cloudFiles, Unity Catalog, bronze/silver/gold pipelines, streaming tables, materialized views.
Data Engineering
PySpark transformations, CSV ingestion, ETL/ELT architecture, hybrid ingestion, operational data synchronisation, data validation, performance tuning.
Cloud Platforms
Microsoft Azure, AWS, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, cloud migration, storage integration, secure architecture, Well-Architected principles, cost-aware design.
Databases
Oracle 12c/18c/19c, RAC, ASM, Data Guard, Oracle Exadata, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL.
Analytics & Leadership
Power BI, Power Query / M-code migration, dimensional modelling, executive KPI reporting, stakeholder engagement, technical workshops, risk and compliance.
Credentials
Certifications.
AWS Solutions Architect — Associate
2024
Databricks Fundamentals
2024
AWS Well-Architected Proficient
2024
AWS Cloud Practitioner
2023
Azure Data Fundamentals
2022
Oracle Autonomous & Cloud Infrastructure Specialist
2020–2023
Oracle Certified Professional
2011
BI Certificate — Data for Decision Making
2024
Values
How I work.
Boring beats clever
The system that's still understandable at 3am beats the elegant one nobody can debug. I optimise for the on-call engineer.
Governance from day one
Retrofitting compliance costs an order of magnitude more than designing for it. Catalogs, lineage and access control ship with v1.
Measure, then migrate
No platform decision without a baseline. "70% faster" only means something if you wrote down where you started.