Senthilnathan Karuppaiah

Senior Engineering Manager & Data / GenAI Architect | PentahoMay 2021 – Present

Remote, New Jersey · Pentaho was part of Hitachi Vantara until 15 June 2026

• Run delivery management, release readiness and engineering standards for the follow-the-sun team behind Pentaho Data Integration (PDI), Pentaho Business Analytics (PBA) and Pentaho Data Catalog.
• Own quality and performance engineering for Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) — an enterprise ETL and data integration product — covering connectors, transformations and job orchestration, large-volume performance runs and release readiness.
• Built TestDataLake, an internal governed data platform engineered like a real customer business application — dlthub ingestion pipelines feeding DBT models — producing realistic data at volume for catalog, discovery, classification and lineage validation.
• Drive engineering and architecture for Pentaho Data Catalog — automated discovery, classification, metadata harvesting and lineage across many thousands of data sources and billions of rows and files, spanning JDBC databases, structured and unstructured documents on file systems and network drives, object stores and lakehouses; applied data and pipeline observability, lineage and provenance across governed platforms via Grafana, Prometheus and OpenObserve.
• Extended the governance model beyond data to ML model and AI agent governance — bringing catalog, lineage and policy controls to the models and agents themselves for regulated enterprise customers.
• Took customer-facing GenAI from prototype through production with product engineering and enterprise customers — grounding AI chat and analytics on governed semantic layers, with evals, guardrails and human review in place before release.
• Designed NLP/ML classification and metadata enrichment (Legal-BERT served via BentoML) and privacy-safe LLM processing (Presidio) for sensitive enterprise data in-product.
• Built the SDET and Performance Engineering competencies from the ground up — defining the practice, standards and tooling, hiring and training engineers, and automating 80% of regression testing; scaled SDET from its Io-Tahoe origins into a far larger capability.
• Developed and introduced AI-DLC and the Pentaho SDET AI Workbench — a spec-driven AI engineering methodology combining requirements traceability, deterministic tooling, automated validation, human review and repeatable evaluation; adopted as a standard across the wider engineering team and in internal production use.
• Serve as Data Solutions Architect across 10+ concurrent enterprise engagements — large banks, insurance, healthcare and life sciences, government and a leading US mortgage institution — delivering Catalog, Discovery and Lakehouse implementations through discovery, BRDs, specs, demos, workshops and enablement with CDO, CISO and product stakeholders.

Solutions Architect / Client Delivery & Head of Production Engineering | Io-Tahoe LLCDec 2018 – May 2021

New York City, New York

• Rejoined Io-Tahoe — an early AI-driven data discovery and governance product company, acquired twice — having been with the team since its Rokittech days; shaped product capabilities from ideation through enterprise implementation.
• Led ActiveDQ, a data quality product built natively on Snowflake — delivering quality capability that ran directly against warehouse data for enterprise customers.
• Led client delivery and production engineering across banking, insurance and healthcare — scoping, implementation, reliability and release readiness for multiple concurrent engagements; turned customer goals into repeatable delivery playbooks.
• Established the SDET competency from the ground up — defining test automation standards, tooling and engineering discipline that were later scaled organization-wide at Pentaho.

Solutions Architect | AZ-Teach Radiology & Open MRIJul 2017 – Nov 2018

Mesa, Arizona

• Architected a custom Radiology Information System (RIS), HL7 integration engine, and web/mobile applications for multi-site radiology centers.