Babak Badkoubeh

I'm an engineering lead with a background in control systems and reinforcement learning, applying closed-loop principles to real-time data systems. Over the last decade, I’ve built and led low-latency, high-precision platforms across fintech, supply chain, and IoT. My work spans stream processing, event-driven architecture, and production ML systems. I currently own the data platform at a private equity fintech firm, where I lead a cross-functional team and maintain our core financial valuation model. With a strong foundation in control theory and RL, my career has followed a balance of exploiting what I know while exploring new frontiers across industries and systems. I advocate for practical, adaptive systems that learn, reason, and act under uncertainty—driven by reinforcement learning, algorithmic thinking, and modern data platforms. CORE SKILLS & FOCUS AREAS • DATA ARCHITECTURE & ENGINEERING Snowflake, Spark, Kafka, Airflow, AWS Glue, dbt, ETL/ELT, real-time pipelines, stream processing, data lakes • MACHINE LEARNING Traditional ML methods, Databricks, AWS SageMaker Studio, ML lifecycle, model training & deployment • PROGRAMMING Python, SQL, PySpark • REINFORCEMENT LEARNING Q-learning, DQN, PPO, actor-critic methods, MDPs, online learning, adaptive control systems • LEADERSHIP Cross-functional team management, product delivery, stakeholder collaboration • EMERGING TECH Vector databases, graph databases, foundation models, causal inference Let’s connect and explore how we can unlock smarter decisions through data, ML, and intelligent system design.