Abhijit Joshi – Staff Data Engineer | Technological Futurist | IT Future Leader Awardee
Abhijit Joshi is a visionary Staff Data Engineer at Oportun Inc., a mission-driven financial services company based in San Carlos, California. With over 15 years of hands-on experience across financial, media, and fintech sectors, Abhijit has become a prominent force in data engineering and artificial intelligence innovation. His passion for driving intelligent data ecosystems and building resilient, scalable platforms has earned him numerous accolades—including the 2024 IT Future Leader of the Year award by the Titan Awards and speaking engagements at world-renowned conferences like TSIA Envision World in Las Vegas.
At Oportun, Abhijit leads enterprise-grade data platform initiatives with a strong focus on AI-powered automation, MLOps, and real-time data integrity. He has architected and implemented mission-critical data pipelines that serve as the backbone for fraud detection, regulatory reporting, and customer analytics. His work has contributed to increasing the operational efficiency of the data ecosystem by over 40% and reducing time-to-insight across product and risk teams. His technical arsenal includes Databricks, Apache Spark, Python, Airflow, and DBT—deployed at scale using Unity Catalog, S3, and GitHub Actions to orchestrate robust data governance and security.
Abhijit is recognized not only for his technical acumen but also for his leadership. He collaborates across departments, mentors junior engineers, and works closely with data stewards and DBAs to create a federated, compliant, and AI-ready data platform. He has designed reusable frameworks for anomaly detection, metadata tagging, and quality scoring—offering industry-wide replicability.
Before joining Oportun, Abhijit served as a Senior Data Engineer at ViacomCBS (now Paramount Global) in New York City. There, he led data initiatives that powered ad revenue analytics and content performance insights. By building scalable orchestration platforms and optimizing GCP resource usage, he saved the company over $120,000 annually. His collaboration with ad sales and marketing leaders helped streamline the measurement of campaign effectiveness and return on investment.
Abhijit’s earlier tenure includes a long-standing consultancy role at Morgan Stanley, where he worked on risk and regulatory reporting frameworks, and a developer role at Union Bank of California. Each phase of his journey is marked by measurable impact, innovation, and a deep understanding of the data life cycle.
Abhijit is also a prolific researcher, with 23 peer-reviewed technical papers published across reputed journals like the International Journal of Science and Research, Zenodo, and Journal of Scientific and Engineering Research. His writings focus on cutting-edge topics such as quantum-resilient algorithms, federated learning, zero-trust architectures, AI ethics, and streaming anomaly detection. Notably, his paper “Immutable Production Data Access in Lower Environments” redefined best practices for data compliance using Unity Catalog in Databricks.
He holds multiple industry certifications including Databricks Data Engineer Professional, Machine Learning Associate, and Six Sigma Green Belt. His expertise extends to GCP, AWS, Docker, Terraform, and Jenkins, with a strategic lens on automation and efficiency.
Beyond the technical realm, Abhijit believes in humanizing data by aligning data platforms with user empathy, ethical AI principles, and long-term societal value. He has been featured in TechBullion, Free Press Journal, TFI Post, and TFI Global, where he shared his insights on how data integration and AI are revolutionizing customer relations and media engagement.
As a respected figure in the tech community, Abhijit frequently mentors aspiring data professionals and contributes to open-source projects. His GitHub repositories showcase reusable architectures for modern data platforms. He also maintains a personal blog, Data World from Abhijit, where he shares thought leadership, technical walkthroughs, and practical frameworks for building next-generation data systems.
Abhijit holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering and is based in Milpitas, California. Outside of work, he enjoys exploring innovation in electric mobility—being an early adopter of the Tesla Model Y—and recently embraced fatherhood with the birth of his daughter in 2024. Whether scaling data pipelines, publishing scholarly works, or leading by example, Abhijit continues to redefine what’s possible at the intersection of data engineering and AI.
