Mayank Sethi
Principal Database Engineer

Mayank Sethi

Principal Database Engineer

I build enterprise data systems at petabyte scale — and write about what actually breaks.

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Mayank Sethi, Principal Database Engineer
About

Building systems where downtime isn't an option.

Mayank Sethi is a Principal Database Engineer specializing in enterprise-scale financial data infrastructure. Over 17 years, he has built and governed critical data platforms at two of the most demanding institutions in financial services — PIMCO, one of the world's largest fixed-income managers, and Group1001, an $80 billion insurance and asset management enterprise.

His work lives at the intersection of database architecture, cloud security automation, and AI-driven governance. He has originated novel technical frameworks, published peer-reviewed and trade research, and shipped production systems governing hundreds of thousands of sensitive data columns.

17+
Years of Experience
950,000
Columns Governed by AI Classification
3 PB
Data Infrastructure Managed
Experience

Seventeen years inside the engine rooms of finance.

2024 — Present
Group1001
Principal Database Engineer
$80B insurance & asset management enterprise
  • Architected Snowflake platform from ground-up: 200+ users, 90+ databases, 1,100+ schemas
  • Originated the SCALER framework for enterprise credential lifecycle management — 1,000+ accounts, zero incidents
  • Designed AI-driven PII/SPI classification system governing 950,000 columns across 40+ source systems
  • Improved CIS Benchmark compliance from 48% → 92%
  • Led Oracle Fusion decommissioning: 450,000+ business attachments migrated
2019 — 2024
PIMCO
Senior Database Engineer
One of the world's largest fixed-income investment managers
  • Established as firm-wide Snowflake SME and Tech Lead; managed 3PB of historical data across 170+ application teams executing millions of daily queries
  • Led Snowflake cost optimization campaign across 21 app teams — reduced XL+ warehouse spend from $1,300/day to under $200/day; delivered $500K+ in annual savings
  • Engineered HVR environment refresh using zero-copy cloning, reducing refresh time from 36 hours to 45 minutes — saving $120K/year in compute costs
  • Built ServiceNow automation handling 75% of cloud team tickets (1,500+ requests/year), saving 500+ person-hours annually; exceeded 30% automation target, achieving 41%
  • Supported Sybase IQ decommissioning through 20+ training sessions and purpose-built utilities — enabling $1.5M in infrastructure and licensing savings
Original Framework

The SCALER Framework

A novel model for enterprise database credential lifecycle management

Most enterprises manage database credentials reactively — rotated after incidents, tracked in spreadsheets, governed by manual checklists. SCALER (Service Credential Automation Lifecycle for Enterprise Resilience) is a formal state-machine model that treats credential lifecycle as a first-class engineering problem.

Designed and deployed at Group1001, SCALER governed 1,000+ service accounts across 150+ application teams — integrated with ServiceNow for automated lifecycle workflows, completed without a single production incident.

Published in the American Journal of Technology
Read the Paper
Provision
Activate
Rotate
Audit
Retire
Featured Projects

Frameworks and systems shipped to production.

AI-Driven PII/SPI Classification

Production classification and dynamic masking system governing 950,000 columns across 40+ source systems. Hybrid ML + rules engine; incremental re-classification reduces compute by 90%+. Ships with a React/FastAPI self-service governance app.

AI/MLData GovernanceSnowflake

Stock Signal AI

Open-source multi-source financial signal pipeline. Aggregates technical indicators, news sentiment, social media, congressional disclosures, and earnings data. Novel latency budget framework and two-tier deduplication.

Open SourcePythonFinancial Data
View on GitHub

Exadata Server Consolidation

Led enterprise-wide Oracle Exadata consolidation at PIMCO, decommissioning 200+ physical database servers and migrating workloads to a consolidated Exadata architecture. Delivered $2M in infrastructure savings while maintaining zero downtime across critical risk and portfolio management systems.

OracleInfrastructureCost Optimization
Writing & Publications

Research, frameworks, and field notes.

Published in the American Journal of Technology and Towards Data Engineering.

Enterprise Database Credential Lifecycle at Scale
American Journal of Technology — GPR Journals
If User Access Requires Clicking, You Don't Have a Control Plane
Towards Data Engineering · Medium
Why Data Governance Breaks at Scale in Regulated Environments
Medium
Beyond the Loop: How to Refresh 1,000 Snowflake Schemas in Parallel
Towards Data Engineering · Medium
The First Snowflake Mistake That's Almost Impossible to Fix Later
Data and Beyond · Medium
Skills

The stack behind the work.

Databases
Oracle EXADATASnowflakeAWS RDSOracle FusionNeo4j
Cloud & Infra
AWS (RDS, S3, STS)TerraformInfrastructure-as-Code
Languages
PL/SQLPythonSQL
Domains
Data GovernancePII/SPI ClassificationCredential LifecycleData MigrationFinancial Data InfrastructurePipeline Architecture
Integrations
SailPointServiceNowMicrosoft Graph APIDagsterGrafana

Let's connect.

I'm selectively open to conversations about enterprise data architecture, speaking invitations, and advisory discussions in financial data infrastructure. If you're building something at scale and hitting hard problems — let's talk.