Thulani Charles David Mngadi

I am a data and AI architect with more than 21 years of experience turning enterprise data into something a business can actually use. I have worked across Banking, Insurance, Telecommunications, and Retail, both in South Africa and in Europe. My career tracks the whole evolution of the field: from Oracle and Kimball data warehousing, through big data engineering on Hadoop, to modern cloud data architecture on Azure and AWS. Today my focus is the Databricks Lakehouse, Unity Catalog governance, and applied generative AI.

I am a TOGAF 9 certified architect and a Databricks certified data engineer. Over the years I have led and mentored technical teams of up to 17 people, set engineering standards, and built the data platforms that regulated businesses depend on. I care as much about clean, tested, production-grade code as I do about the architecture around it.

I also teach, because I enjoy making hard topics click. I have authored industry-recognised courses on Python and Spark, and my style is always hands-on. You build a real project, one step at a time, and you finish with skills you can use at work the next day. If you are serious about data engineering, I will meet you where you are and take you further.