Senior Data & Cloud Engineer · Frankfurt

Heni
Ben-Arab

Building cloud-native data platforms

years delivering data infrastructure for German enterprise clients in banking, transportation, and media. AWS & GCP certified.

Heni Ben-Arab

About

Who I am

Heni Ben-Arab

I'm a Senior Data & Cloud Engineer based in Frankfurt, with years of experience delivering cloud-native data platforms for leading German companies in banking, transportation, and media.

My work sits at the intersection of software engineering and data infrastructure — from designing lakehouse architectures on AWS and GCP to building high-throughput Spark pipelines and containerized backend services. I hold both the AWS Solutions Architect Associate and GCP Professional Data Engineer certifications.

Outside of work, I'm into finance, reading, and electronic music — I occasionally put together DJ sets.

Background

Education & Experience

Education

M.Sc. Computer Science

University of Passau · 2014 – 2017

Specialization in Information and Communication Systems.

Master Thesis: Using Recurrent Neural Networks for Knowledge Graph Extraction.

National Diploma in Telecommunications Engineering

Higher School of Communication of Tunis · 2012 – 2015

Double degree in partnership with the University of Passau.

Classes Préparatoires

Tunis Preparatory Engineering Institute · 2010 – 2012

Mathematics & Physics. Ranked 89th out of 4,000 in the national competitive engineering entrance exam.

Experience

Freelancer

Self-employed / Freiberufler · 2024 – present

  • Data engineering and backend consulting — specialising in legacy-to-modern platform migrations (Java, Spark, Docker)

Senior Data Engineer

DB Systel · 2021 – present

  • Design of big-data architectures on AWS
  • Development of ETL workflows based on Spark
  • Development of containerized Java applications

IT Consultant

ITinera projects & experts · 2017 – 2021

Consulting clients in banking, transportation, and media. Primarily as Software Developer and Data Engineer.

  • Backend development with Java & Spring
  • Design of data lake architectures on AWS and GCP
  • Development of ETL frameworks based on Spark

Tech Stack

Skills

Languages

Java Scala Python SQL

Data & Big Data

Apache Spark Apache Kafka Apache Hudi Delta Lake Apache Airflow Apache NiFi Apache Hive Apache Hadoop

Cloud

AWS GCP Terraform AWS CDK Docker Kubernetes

Java Ecosystem

Spring Boot Spring Data Spring Security Spring Batch JPA / Hibernate Apache Camel Maven

Databases

PostgreSQL MySQL MongoDB InfluxDB

DevOps & Observability

Git GitLab CI Jenkins Grafana Kibana

Credentials

Certifications

AWS Solutions Architect Associate

AWS Solutions Architect
Associate

GCP Professional Data Engineer

GCP Professional
Data Engineer

Expertise

What I do

Data Engineering

End-to-end data platform design: from ingestion and streaming (Kafka, NiFi) to large-scale batch processing (Spark) and lakehouse storage (Hudi, Delta). I help organizations build reliable, cost-efficient data infrastructure that actually delivers insights.

Cloud Architecture

AWS and GCP architecture with a data engineering focus. Certified on both platforms, I design cloud-native solutions that are scalable, secure, and cost-aware — whether greenfield builds, migrations, or optimizing existing infrastructure.

Software Development

Enterprise-grade backend engineering with Java and the Spring ecosystem. I build robust, maintainable services designed for production scale — REST APIs, batch processing, event-driven systems — with a focus on clean architecture and testability.