Paul Needleman.

Empowering Teams • Driving Outcomes

I am a solution-oriented strategist who empowers teams to solve complex enterprise challenges through modern, outcome-driven data architecture. Drawing on deep experience in the financial services sector, I specialize in bridging the gap between C-suite vision and hands-on technical execution. By aligning people, process, and cutting-edge engineering—like Snowflake Iceberg and Agentic AI—I enable resilient data-driven transformation for the Global 2000.

17+
Years
Experience
4,200+
LinkedIn
Followers
10+
Technical
Publications
Fortune 50
Financial
Services

Cloud Data Architecture

Apache Iceberg Data Lakehouse Data Warehousing ETL / ELT Data Modeling

AI & GenAI

Snowflake Cortex Agentic AI LLMs Python Streamlit

Strategy & Leadership

CDO Advisory Enterprise Governance Product Leadership Strategic Accounts

// Strategic Writing & Articles

Featured • Performance

Databricks vs (Optimized) Snowflake

A data-driven performance comparison between Snowflake Iceberg and Databricks. Viral industry benchmark with 600+ LinkedIn reactions.

2024 Architecture

Automating Externally Managed Iceberg

Step-by-step guide on using Snowflake Catalog integration with Polaris to manage open storage tables at scale.

2024 AI Strategy

Snowflake Cortex Agents

Technical walkthrough for building autonomous AI agents that reason over private enterprise data using Snowflake Cortex.

2025 Governance

Secure Data Platform Best Practices

Enterprise-grade strategies for security, governance, and disaster recovery in modern cloud data ecosystems.

2024 GenAI

How To: DeepSeek in Snowflake

Operationalizing DeepSeek-R1 reasoning models within Snowflake's Cortex AI ecosystem for financial services use cases.

2025 Strategy

The Modern Big Data Platform

Strategic overview of evolving architectures, focusing on the transition from monolithic lakes to distributed, agile meshes.

LinkedIn Original Archive

View All on Medium

Full Article Library →

// Speaking & Public Sessions

Snowflake Technical Sessions

Open Storage Interoperability with Iceberg

A deep-dive technical session on architecting open storage interoperability using Apache Iceberg with Snowflake — enabling true multi-engine data access without duplication.

2024 Snowflake Technical Sessions

Integrating Databricks with Snowflake Iceberg

Hands-on walkthrough demonstrating how to natively integrate Databricks compute with Snowflake-managed Iceberg tables, enabling seamless interoperability across the modern data stack.

2024 Day of Data @ Virginia Tech

Strategic Panel: AI Privacy & Semantic Data

Panelist at Virginia Tech's Day of Data symposium, discussing real-world risks of generative AI — including privacy exposure, hallucination, and the critical importance of fact-checking AI output.

Nov 2025

// Strategic Experience

Principal Solutions Architect

Snowflake • 2024 — Present

FY25 Snowflake Professional Services Person of the Year

Led the technical architecture for enterprise migrations from Teradata to Snowflake for one of the world's most complex financial institutions — modernizing decades of legacy infrastructure into high-performance, cloud-native data architectures. Leads technical strategy and GenAI initiatives for Fortune 50 accounts, overseeing Snowflake Iceberg interoperability and the deployment of autonomous Cortex Agents for global risk systems.

Sr. Solutions Architect

Snowflake • 2021 — 2024

Architected modern data platforms for Global 2000 enterprises. Focused on Snowflake-managed tables, interoperability standards, and high-concurrency data engineering to drive cloud transformation.

Data and Analytics Leader

Deloitte • 2018 — 2021

Orchestrated CDO-level advisory on data lake modernization and governance frameworks. Directed large-scale delivery teams to build resilient semantic layers, achieving significant ROI for marquee financial and public sector clients.

Manager

Deloitte • 2015 — 2018

Managed large-scale delivery teams to build and optimize Hadoop big data environments using Cloudera. Specialized in high-performance on-premise ETL architectures and enterprise SQL optimization for global clients.

Early Career & Technical Foundations

Guident | BearingPoint • 2006 — 2015

Built a professional foundation focused on complex ETL engineering, building out new dimensional models, and delivering enterprise reporting analytics. Specialized in MDM architecture and technical execution for global financial agencies.

// Education

Virginia Tech

B.S. Business Information Technology

Pamplin College of Business

// Certifications

SnowPro Advanced: Architect SnowPro Core PMP® Certified

// Open Source & Code

Open Source
Open Source Artifacts

@sfc-gh-pneedleman

Demonstrations of Snowflake architectures, Streamlit apps, and Cortex AI implementations.