Fabian Werkmeister

I help you to become fluent in Data and enable you to translate between business & tech ★ Data Scientist @FUNKE ★ 🐍Python 🤖Data Science 🛠️Data Engineering

Why do so many data projects fail to deliver real business value?
Because they often start with a technical discussion, not a business problem.
➡️ And you've likely felt the same frustration as so many others...

Investing in a complex data solution only to find it's over-engineered, over-budget, and doesn't actually solve your core challenge.
You're left with high costs, slow processes and no actionable outcome.

Imagine instead a data solution that is simple, powerful, and cost-effective. One that feels like it was designed exactly for your business and just works.
This is what I can build for you.

I started my career on the business side and switched to data along the way, where my deep passion for that field motivated me to self-taught all the skills I now have.
Sitting on both sides of the table allowed me to really understand and connect both worlds.

This is what you get, if you work with me:

Business-First Approach:
You get a business-minded partner, which listens to your challenges first to ensure the solution we build together is one you actually need. No confusing tech-speak, just pure focus on actionable results for you and your business.

Pragmatic & Cost-Effective Solutions:
You get a lean, powerful, and low-maintenance data analytics platform on Google Cloud Platform, which simply works.

Collaborative & Transparent Process:
You will be a partner in the process, not a spectator. Through regular check-ins and feedback, we ensure alignment at every stage to build something, which actually helps you.

➡️ If you're ready to finally get results from your data, connect or DM me and let’s chat!

Data Scientist

No Budget for Managed ETL? 💰
Here is a lean and cost-effective alternative 👇 

Managed ETL services can kill your budget
They are designed to punish you for your growth
They feel essential, but their pricing will spiral as your data volume increases

But you can also build something yourself
Use dltHub and serverless functions / containers to perform data ingestion:
✅ You only pay for execution time, aligning cost directly with usage
✅ You can focus on the actual problem, since dlt does the heavy lifting for you

What's the biggest headache dlt solved for you recently? ✌ 

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Hi, I'm Fabian👋

I write about building lean and cost-effective analytics platforms on GCP

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Lean & cost-efficient data systems on GCP for businesses to finally turn their data into decisions | 🛠️ Senior Data Engineer @ FUNKE

I don't have a linear career in data.
For a long time, I let that be a limiting belief.

I studied economics and worked in that field for some years
I learned what KPIs are and what really drives numbers and businesses
I did a lot of powerpoints and fought with excel, but this wasn’t a profession for me

So I took a data science bootcamp and switched to data
I still remember how everyone in the bootcamp was way better at coding than me
For years in data, I felt I was always playing catch-up to the people who grew up with this stuff

But with time and more seniority, this perception shifted
I notice that using tech and tools doesn’t generate value on its own
Value is created in knowing when to use which tool to drive a business action

With this in mind, I began to see my non-linear career path as my biggest asset.
Since I lived in both worlds, I also know very well how to connect them.
I start with the action, then build the absolute minimal system for that.

I may not be the best coder or technical expert out there
But I speak and understand business language
And this enables true solutions

If you’re also coming from a non-traditional path, stop trying to fit the mold.
Your diverse background isn't a weakness.
It can be your ultimate advantage.


What’s an unexpected asset your career path has given you?

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Hi, I'm Fabian👋
I write about building lean and cost-effective data systems on GCP
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The biggest lie in data
"We just need a new tool"


A new tool won't fix a broken process.
A new tool won't magically create a data-driven culture.
The most successful projects follow a business-first mantra.
👉 Tools are the last piece of the puzzle.

✅ Focus on Culture: Talk with the business teams.
✅ Focus on Processes: How are things done right now and how should they work in the future?
✅ Focus on the User: Identify the friction points between the data and the action or decision taken by an end user.

Remember:
Tools are just the vehicle - culture and process are the engine!

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Hi, I'm Fabian 👋

I write about building lean and cost-effective data systems on GCP
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Stop obsessing over the architecture diagram.
Obsess over the problem.

❌ Typical data project goes like this:

Month 1-2: Vendor selection
Month 3-4: Pipelines and modeling
Month 5: Dashboarding
Month 6: Show it to the business
(and find out it’s useless)


✅ The Value Path looks like this:

1. The "Why" Phase (40% of effort)
Deep stakeholder interviews.
Find out problems and decisions to be made.
Don't write a single line of SQL until you know that.

2. The "How" Phase (10% of effort):
Lean tech selection.
Most tools deliver the same output.
Choose what is convenient and available.
(if possible choose also what is cheap)

3. The "Build" Phase (50% of effort):
Minimalist implementation.
Automating only what is necessary.
Build the shortest bridge between data & decision.


You can build a "perfect" scalable platform in 6 months that nobody uses

Or you can build an "imperfect" targeted solution in 6 weeks that changes the business.

—
Hi, I'm Fabian👋
I write about building lean and cost-effective data systems on GCP
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My data team was most often seen as a cost center.
Here is how we shifted this to become enablers 👇

I used to build the thing I was asked for.
I finished the tickets.
I delivered the code.

But that often left behind a black box solution that no one on the business side truly understood. 
A technical problem was solved without transferring the value of it to the business.
That's how data projects solely generate costs.

Do this instead
✅ Prioritizing the business problem over technical solutions.
✅ Designing the platform to deliver a single, clear business action.
✅ Measuring success by time or costs saved, not by processed data volume.
✅ Transferring knowledge so the business team can understand and act on the data without you.

That’s how you build trust.
That’s how you generate value tied to the costs.
That’s how your projects and your team are seen as an investment.

TL;DR
Any data project needs to directly and measurably impact the bottom-line of the business
➡️ if your project doesn’t deliver this, it will only be seen as a financial liability

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Hi, I'm Fabian 👋
I write about building lean and cost-effective data systems on GCP
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SQL is important for a data engineer
But the most valuable skill isn’t taught in tutorials

I’m not talking about Terraform, Python or BigQuery
These are merely tools and techniques to work with data
My most important skill is the ability to translate:

Business ➡️ Tech
Stakeholder: "I need real-time data for my weekly sales report"
Me: "We need a simple batch pipeline that updates data each morning"

Tech ➡️ Business
Tech: "We implemented incremental loading for big source tables"
Me: "Your Monday morning dashboard will now be ready at 8:00 AM instead of 10:30 AM."

When you bridge this gap with communication, you do two things:
👉 You protect the business from over-engineering (and over-spending)
👉 You work on things stakeholders actually care about (time and money)

Learn to speak and understand business language
That is how you move from a data engineer to a strategic business partner

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Hi, I'm Fabian👋

I write about building lean and cost-effective data systems on GCP
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The era of Big Data is over
The era of Big Action will finally unlock the value of data

For the past decade, billions were spent on data stacks
We now have 100+ tools to pipe, clean and visualize data
And yet, decision-making velocity hasn't improved

The systems we built were designed for observation, not operation
Your data system is worthless until that potential is converted into movement

Let's look at a simple example:
➡️ 100 customers haven't purchased in 3 months

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐰𝐚𝐲
- Discover this (most businesses don't even get to this point)
- Download CSV
- Format in Excel
- Upload to HubSpot
- Manually trigger "we miss you" email
- By the time you do this, 50% of them have already moved to a competitor

❌ 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗳𝗿𝗶𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗸𝘀 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺


𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝘄𝗮𝘆
- Your system detects these automatically
- Your system pushes these to HubSpot
- An email workflow is triggered
- You get a ping to approve this
- Emails are sent

✅ 𝗪𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗺𝗮𝗹 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁, 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗶𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻


Data systems need to pivot
From a reporting source to a trigger
From "what happened?" to action-oriented systems.


𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘁 "𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁-𝘁𝗼-𝗰𝘀𝘃" 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗸𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗱? 😉 

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Hi, I'm Fabian Werkmeister👋
I write about building lean and cost-effective data systems on GCP
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I used to be a data snob
And this attitude prevented valuable solutions

As a data engineer, I think in terms of outputs
I designed whole workflows with a clear result in mind
This was most often a nice dashboard or an automated report

When someone asked for an "Export to Excel" button, I rolled my eyes
I thought "Why do I build of all this if it just ends in a spreadsheet?"
I was missing the point completely!

❌ My job isn't to dictate how people work.
✅ My job is to enable them to work.


If a finance manager is faster in Excel, my fancy dashboard is actually a bottleneck.
If a sales rep needs a CSV to close a deal, my shiny report is blocking revenue.
My business users know way better how they can work efficiently than I do!

👎 I stopped being religious about the tools
👍 I started being religious about the outcome


Now, my philosophy is simple:
👉 Build the pipeline
👉 Ensure the data is available and trusted
👉 Let the user decide the last mile to be actionable

If that means an Excel export or a csv-file?
So be it.

The result at the end of the day is what counts.
Not the tool they used to get there.

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Hi, I'm Fabian Werkmeister 👋

I write about building lean and cost-effective data systems on GCP

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Does your data project have a six-figure price tag?
Bad news, you’ve already failed

A six-figure data stack is not an investment.
It’s a financial liability.
Start with something super simple👇

✅ Identify the Core Problem:
Stop looking at tables and talk to people.
👉 What specific business problem is causing pain?
➡️ "We are spending $50k/month on ads, but I can't tell, which campaigns are actually driving sales"

✅ Define the Actionable Outcome:
Don't start to build before you have a clear goal in mind.
👉 What is the simplest, clearest decision or action that needs to be enabled?
➡️ "I need to see CPA by campaign side-by-side so I can cut the losers, if they fall under value X"

✅ Select the Minimalist Tool:
Only now, start to build something!
👉 What is simplest, most cost-effective setup to deliver that specific action?
➡️ Get campaign data via ETL-tool or scripts, build a simple SQL-pipeline with a cron job, pump it into something consumable for your end user (Excel, BI tool, etc.)

That's it.
That's how you build a fast MVP, which costs almost nothing.
And with this foundation you can iterate and scale up always later on.


What’s one business problem you solved recently where you intentionally chose a simple tool over a complex one? 👇 

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Hi, I'm Fabian👋
I write about building lean and cost-effective data systems on GCP
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Some people meditate.
I build pipelines.

There is a meditative quality to Data Engineering that I haven't found anywhere else.
It satisfies my deep need for organization.
Taking something messy and shaping it into a logical, reliable structure.

It’s like solving a massive puzzle.
Every piece has a place.
Every transformation has a reason (hopefully 😉).

Building pipelines also leads to another passion of mine: serving others.
I use my love for structure to make life easier for the people around me.
I take the complexity onto my plate so they don't have to deal with it.

It's the perfect synergy. 
Solving someone else's problem while satisfying my inner needs.
And that’s why I love what I’m doing each and every day! 


There's nothing quite like that feeling when your pipelines wrap up with a satisfying green checkmark, is there? 😉

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Hi, I'm Fabian👋
I write about building lean and cost-effective data systems on GCP
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Tenet Healthcare

AI Product Director

Trilliant Health

Developed machine learning models to predict various data points in our claims and provider datasets. My role among them was:

• working with Health Plan Price Transparency (HPPT) data to develop a proprietary Rate and Quality Score for payers and providers to enable users to identify who the high-quality *and* affordable providers are
• using machine learning to predict providers' taxonomy classification to enhance our Provider Directory product using claims and NPPES features
• using claims data to infer patients' Primary Service Area (PSA) to enhance many of our products - like our Demand Forecast, Provider Directory, and Network Explorer reaching a ~47% increase in classification accuracy

Data Scientist IV

Unum

• Developed and implemented the company’s first ever AI Governance Framework, aligning AI with enterprise compliance goals and ensuring bias mitigation, model transparency, and reproducibility
• Led the zero-to-one vision, strategy, roadmap, and execution of NLP and AI projects, building scalable AI products across different functional domains while ensuring executive buy-in
• Consistently lead user interviews to discover common pains, needs, and friction points to better inform AI projects

Principal AI Product Manager

• Lead zero-to-one AI projects through Product Discovery, Delivery, and Iteration, while using best Build-Measure-Learn practices
• Orchestrated the cross-functional launch of a scalable NLP-as-a-Service platform (backed by LLMs and GenAI) to address document classification, semantic matching, entity extraction, and summarization leading to a 54% increase over baseline models, a 73% average time savings of common manual processes which drove an annual cost savings of $2.5M
• Championed quick experimentation and iteration on AI initiatives, leading to quicker development and release cycles
• Drove executive buy-in of AI products through heavily-researched operational usability, engineering feasibility, and business viability analyses

Senior Data Scientist / AI Product Manager

Nashville Software School

Data Science Instructor - Assistant (One Cohort)

The General®

•     Led end-to-end 0-1 product development and data science execution across multiple Claims-focused ML initiatives, managing roadmaps, feature definitions, and integration with core systems
•     Identified and prioritized high-impact ML use cases in collaboration with cross-functional stakeholders, translating business needs into scalable predictive models
•     Mentored and coached junior data scientists while also setting standards for model development, engineering best practices, and product delivery
•     Designed, developed, and deployed Silhouette, an internal ML infrastructure tool that automates cloud-based environment setup (AWS), version control (DVC/S3, Git/Bitbucket), and reproducible ML workflows (Pipenv, Cookiecutter)
•     Scaled internal tooling and drove cross-team adoption of Silhouette, reducing friction in deployment and improving reproducibility across ML projects

Lead Data Scientist

•     Shaped data science team vision, product strategy, and foundational infrastructure - establishing the team’s first tech stack, creating its first public-facing AI blog, and launching its first internship program
•     Led zero-to-one development of NLP product using claim notes (Word2Vec, LDA Topic Modeling, Concept Mining) to predict attorney involvement, delivering $2.3M in business savings
•     Built and trained a deep learning model (PyTorch) to classify vehicle damage from claim images, enhancing adjuster workflows
•     Used OCR to extract structured text from scanned claim documents to identify and surface specific types of claim denials
•     Developed a REST API web app to support labeling workflows, enabling scalable image annotation for model training
•     Owned product lifecycle and modeling for a total-loss vehicle prediction system, driving $2.5M in annual cost savings

Data Scientist II

• Perform various natural language processing tasks (R/tidytext, Python/gensim), including sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and Word2Vec/Doc2Vec
• Build a nation-wide price elasticity model using a Mixed Effects/Hierarchical Logistic Regression algorithm (with cross classified and nested random effects) to predict demand for a product at various pricing structures (R, Julia)
• Predict a claim's route by converting claim notes to Word2Vec word embeddings and feeding those word vectors into machine learning models for multi-class prediction (Python/Gensim/Scikit-learn)
• Build an interactive geo-spatial smoothing app (Python/Flask, PostGIS, Leaflet.js) for various key performance indicators using AWS S3 as the data store
• Collaboratively design and implement statistical techniques and machine learning models with team members and department heads
• Create pipeline to transfer data from SQL Server database on local server to PostgreSQL database on AWS EC2 instances
• Assist the data science team in transitioning from local servers to cloud computing on AWS
• Architect and implement RESTful APIs (Python/Flask, Celery, Redis, SQL) that expose various statistical models for consumption

Data Scientist I

Perception Health (Acquired by Huron)

•	Built machine learning models (Python) that used lab data to predict if a patient would be admitted or not and visualized results using an ROC curve and confusion matrix
•	Worked alongside Perception Health's Principal Data Scientist to analyze physicians’ referral patterns and consult hospitals on how to best reduce out-of-network referrals
•	Used GIS (PostGIS, Leaflet.js) techniques to visualize healthcare trends geographically
•	Lead production on Perception Health's flagship product since March 2015 to the present
•	Built customizable, interactive dashboards (Leaflet.js, D3.js, Crossfilter.js) into the primary platform
•	Optimized SQL queries and data preparation for faster graph rendering and page-load times
•	Utilized Agile methodologies (JIRA) to organize releases while ramping up features
•	Worked with the lead architect to optimize SQL scripts across the primary product's platform
•	Converted the platform to a RESTful API for more efficiency and to decouple the server-side code from the client side templates
•	Designed and developed an internal SQL application (Python, Flask) for non-programmers to easily upload data into a database, making repetitive communication with the database faster and more memory efficient

Software Engineer Project Lead

Perception Health

• Built machine learning models (Python, scikit-learn) that used lab data to predict if a patient would be admitted or not and visualized results using an ROC curve and confusion matrix
• Worked alongside Perception Health's Principal Data Scientist to analyze physicians’ referral patterns and consult hospitals on how to best reduce out-of-network referrals

Data Scientist / Software Engineer

Relode, LLC

• Designed and wrote programs that efficiently scraped useful data from various websites using Python and created web applications to be used internally by Relode sales representatives to access this data.
• Uploaded and maintained captured data in a MySQL database.
• Wrote Python scripts that reformated and correctly structured raw, unstructured data.

Software Developer (Contractor)

Digital Reasoning

• Parsed corrupted XML files in Python using ElementTree and Regular Expressions in order to pin point the corruption
• Designed and wrote programs that efficiently cleaned and structured the corrupt data in order to increase the accuracy rate of the firm’s predictive models

Checkd.in

• Employed web-parsing techniques to convert unstructured, raw data into a workable format to perform statistical analyses
• Utilized Facebook's Social Graph API to scrape useful data
• Designed and wrote programs that parsed and statistically analyzed Facebook data using Python

Software Developer (Intern)

Building data products @ Gridsearch | Principal DS @ Trilliant Health

I partner with businesses to bring data and AI-centric products and features to market. 

I also build machine-learning apps with and for my sons. Currently, I’m building a Natural Language Understanding app I call LADNER (Locating Assignments and Dates using Named Entity Recognition) that locates homework assignments and due dates on his teachers’ websites and emails, and then automatically adds them to my Trello calendar daily so we don’t miss homework assignments or quizzes. 

Before that, I built a machine-learning app called Achoo that predicted my son's inhaler usage using air quality, weather, and allergen data.

In my career and hobbies, I build machine learning and data-centric software that makes life easier.

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