Jasper Aorangi Email & Phone Number

Aotearoa

Westpac is one of Australia's Big Four banks, and with 13M customer worldwide, is Australia's first and oldest banking institution. I was responsible for data/enterprise strategy and architecture in the data warehousing and platforms space, including solution consultation, communication, and architecture. I focused on developing enterprise-wide strategy for a redesign of the data infrastructure (from on-premise into Cloud) and reducing cost and time to market for key data outcomes whilst increasing usability and adoption. I also consulted on new or stalled projects, concentrating on making the complex simple whilst aligning to future state.By collaborating closely with customers, and leveraging my deep understanding of business needs and systems, and my strategic thinking skills, I managed the strategy, enterprise architecture, and solution architecture for a complete redesign of the on-premise data warehouse into a real-time cloud-based solution. A clear strategy and delivery roadmap for the data warehouse uplift was produced for review by senior management, which greatly reduced architectural ambivalence across the organisation.As well as this, my extensive technical knowledge and non-linear problem solving and big picture thinking skills enabled me to use information gained from inclusive customer engagement to design multiple real-time data sourcing and integration solutions. These supported the strategic vision for a range of systems of record and solved problems that were deemed ‘too hard’ for many years.Additionally, I utilised my Agile, high performance team management, and servant leadership skills, to lead a fresh team during COVID-19 in order to ensure the prompt delivery of data to Government and inform COVID-19 epidemiological models. Whilst doing this, we rapidly advanced the use of key new technologies during a period of crisis for the organisation and the country.

New Zealand

I acted as Data/Enterprise Architect, Solution Architect, and Team Lead in the data warehousing and platforms space. My responsibilities included acting enterprise and solution architect for data sourcing, designing and proving real-time data sourcing from Mainframe applications into reporting data lake, upskilling existing staff in modern data engineering development practices and tooling and implementing bespoke integrations using real-time architecture.In this role, through stakeholder consultation, systems thinking, and non-linear problem solving, I produced a high-level strategy and implementation plan for real-time data sourcing from Mainframe, Midrange, and other difficult sources. The strategy stimulated the creation of build and implementation teams, set the expectation and focus for solution architectures across the organisation, and unlocked fundamental new data outcomes for analysis and reporting.A highlight in this role was developing environments and documentation for new starters which greatly improved on-boarding, throughput and consistency across the Data Engineering Chapter.I also utilised my tutoring, mentoring, and coaching skills, together with my experience in data engineering, to train incumbent staff in the use of Git, testing, Apache Spark, Airflow, and associated data engineering development best practices. Classes had high turnout with good engagement and resulted in available documentation and forums on data engineering best practices.Additionally, by using Kafka and Kafka Connect, I built and directed teams to build, various database integrations whilst extending stock functionality of Kafka Connect to encompass site and application specific data and date formats.

Te Pūnaha Matatini is the Aotearoa New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence for complex systems. It is funded by the Tertiary Education Commission and hosted by the University of Auckland. I was responsible for designing, building, and ingesting data to support the production of reports on disinformation spread on social media for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), specifically around COVID-19, related vaccines, and the alt-right. My role included designing and building data ingestion, storage, and presentation infrastructure to support research activities, gathering and analysing social media data, and assisting and tutoring undergraduate students in software development and research best practices.In this role, I utilised my academic team leadership experience to manage a project to ascertain where New Zealanders got their information about COVID-19. The reports that we produced for the ODPM showed that, largely, New Zealanders are rational and refer to primary material.I also leveraged cloud infrastructure, data engineering and general *nix skills, provisioning, configuring and maintaining Infrastructure, the data ingestion and data preparation processes, and data presentation layers to provide data scientists with highly available, up-to-date data.

Telstra Group is an Australian telecommunications company that builds and operates telecommunications networks and markets related products and services. It is Australia's largest telecommunications company by market share.I was responsible for improving and extending existing unsupervised outlier detection models from a customer-first perspective, whilst improving team best practices through notebooks with a focus on repeatability. This included reviewing outlier detection models closely with end users to improve feature selection and context presentation, increasing end-user engagement and involvement with the data science team, improving the data science teams' operating model and championing model repeatability and explainability.By collaborating closely with end users and SMEs, I improved the quality of model output by ensuring that the model and results made sense and were relevant to the use case. I greatly reduced the run times of models whilst increasing their usability.As well, through customer-driven context data selection, rollup, and presentation, I improved the supporting information for each ML model output, enabling analysts to better assess model outcomes. I created regular forums and check-ins with users of our product to inform changes in the front-end application which greatly increased end-user engagement.By collaboratively working with the team to understand skills and gaps, I introduced development best practices to the data science team of code visibility, repeatability, and review. These tools continued to be developed and expanded by the team, as they enabled quantitative evaluation of candidate models whilst highlighting the inherent risks associated with fixed test datasets, and unconscious bias.Finally, by breaking down silos and encouraging stronger collaboration, I decreased time to market of our ML models, and increased trust between data scientists and engineers.

I was responsible for streamlining a highly complex Azure infrastructure deployment to infrastructure as code using Ansible. This included translating a complex manual deployment process of Azure resources to an automatable infrastructure-as-code project in Ansible, and working with solution architects to enhance and extend the compute environment's capabilities and security.Using my strong development skills, I implemented a multi-environment Azure resource deployment in Ansible which included the deployment of networking, network security groups (NSGs), virtual network appliances including Paolo Alto and their configuration, and virtual machines (VMs). This work enabled the delivery of the product as a service and for reliable tear-down and redeployment, especially in disaster recovery scenarios.By carefully evaluating the infrastructure requirements in light of cloud paradigms, I also reduced the cost of infrastructure by at least a ‘Mini Cooper a day’ and extended Ansible Azure scripts and deployment parallelism to reduce the time to deployment of a complete environment from 3-5 weeks to 20-30 minutes.

This role continued my duties from Wynyard Group after Telstra’s acquisition.

Security analytics provider Cognevo (part of software company Wynyard Group) was acquired by Telstra in 2016 to bolster its managed security services worldwide. Telstra was an existing customer of Cognevo prior to the purchase agreement.I was responsible for implementing complex unsupervised outlier detection models in Spark, Scala, and Cassandra, optimising and tuning Spark/Scala models to reduce run time and memory requirements, implementing complex ETLs over numerous sources for various customers and building an extensible deployment and management framework for distributed big-data compute and storage nodes.By applying the high performance team management techniques being taught to me by my mentor, I played a key role in developing a high-performing team from a group of brilliant individuals under managerial guidance. Team output well exceeded expectations, largely due to the trust built by utilising collaboration and conflict resolution techniques.I also utilised my platform and data engineering skills to build a first in-market network intrusion detection product based on unsupervised models in a very short timeframe. My contributions remained at the core of the product.

Canterbury & West Coast, New Zealand

The University of Canterbury is a public research university based in Christchurch. It is New Zealand's second-oldest university, after the University of Otago, which was founded four years earlier, in 1869.With responsibility for uncovering new problems and developing applicable tools and methodologies, I collaborated with the Associate Professor on a range of cutting-edge economic problems. A highlight was typesetting and diagram creation which resulted in the publication of an academic text.

Master Of Science (M.Sc.), Mathematics

Big data investigation parametrically modeling civility on the Old Bailey Online dataset.

Bachelor Of Science (B.Sc.), Mathematical Physics