Data Engineer & Applied Physicist

Riley
Zurrin

I build production systems where
standard playbooks fail.

Riley Zurrin

About

Technical Founder

Built and deployed Syntropic, a production-grade Data Warehouse UI (React/FastAPI/AWS/Terraform) currently serving live traffic for a SaaS client.

Scientific Rigor

M.Sc. Physics (UofT) & Honours B.Sc. Math/Physics (UBC) with a 4.0 GPA. First-principles thinking applied to data architecture.

Research & Output

Published author (fMRI statistical modeling) and Kaggle Silver Medalist. I thrive in high-ambiguity environments.

Technical Arsenal

Languages

PythonSQLJavaScriptHTML/CSS

Data & Cloud

AzureAWSDatabricksApache SparkSnowflakeFabricdbtAirflowDagsterDuckDBSQL ServerPostgreSQLPower BIStreamlitSupabaseGitDockerTerraform

Frameworks

DjangoFastAPIReactCI/CD

Experience

Present Apr 2024

Data Engineer

Dakota Analytics
  • Engineered a greenfield data platform using Dagster, DuckDB, and dbt to ETL billions of records
  • Led a technical team of 3 to design and implement custom data solutions for enterprise clients
  • Built an AI document ingestion framework with Databricks agents, saving 20+ hours of manual entry weekly
  • Designed and built the company's first client-facing web application using Django on Azure
  • Architected end-to-end data warehouses for large-scale companies using Databricks, Fabric, and SQL Server
  • Automated data lineage documentation via GitHub Actions and Claude API, reducing manual overhead by 90%
  • Optimized pipeline efficiency by designing incremental refresh policies, reducing latency and compute costs
Mar 2024 Sep 2022

Data Analyst / Researcher

BC Children's Hospital
  • Applied advanced statistical modeling and data manipulation to fMRI neuroimaging data
  • Published two research papers with 40+ citations
Brain network visualization Hemodynamic response analysis
Sep 2022 May 2022

Data Analyst

Balloon Astrophysics Group — UofT
  • Configured telemetry data and analytics from SuperBIT, a NASA balloon-borne telescope
  • Designed and built components to NASA standards at their facility in Texas
Apr 2022 Sep 2019

Instructor: Data Analysis in Physics

Universities of Toronto & British Columbia
  • Mentored 180+ students in data analysis techniques and provided technical troubleshooting for lab environments

Education

M.Sc. Physics

University of Toronto
GPA: 3.96 2021 — 2022

Honours B.Sc. Mathematics & Physics

University of British Columbia
GPA: 4.00 2016 — 2021

Projects

LIVE

Syntropic

Production-grade Data Warehouse UI enabling business users to interact directly with data lakes. Serving live production traffic for a major SaaS platform.

FastAPIReactAWSTerraformDockerDatabricksSnowflakeBigQueryAirflow
  • 3-stage deployment with automated CI/CD
  • Enterprise RBAC, approvals, and audit trails
  • Monitored webhooks and data quality rules
  • MCP server & app embedding the UI natively in Claude and ChatGPT
KAGGLE SILVER

HealthStats

Web app for visualizing CDC health data. Full data pipeline from web scraping to interactive dashboards.

StreamlitSeleniumBeautifulSoup
1,500+ downloads

Clebsch-Gordan Calculator

Niche computational tool automating quantum mechanics algebra for physics researchers.

JavaScriptHTMLCSS

NHL Points Predictor

Predictive modeling for NHL player performance using mid-season statistics.

PythonMLStatistics

EEG Brain-Computer Interface

Signal processing for EEG acquisition system. Home automation via brain activity classification.

PythonSignal ProcessingML

Publications

View on Google Scholar

Beyond Code

Co-founded Compassion Services — raised $20k in scholarships, funded a well in Nepal Biked to Niagara Falls Book reviews on Goodreads Kiteboarding in Mexico