Richie Bachala
Enterprise Data & AI Leader

Richie Bachala

Head of Solutions Architecture — US West  ·  Snowflake
20+ years across Retail & CPG, Energy, Finance, and SaaS
🎤 Speaking June 2026 — Menlo Park Retail & CPG Energy & Resources AI & Interoperability SE Team Leadership
Enterprise data and AI — strategy, architecture, execution.
LinkedIn Medium
Industry Depth Retail & CPG Energy & Resources Financial Services Healthcare SaaS & Technology Manufacturing
Upcoming Event
June 2026

TechEquity AI Forum — Snowflake SVAI Hub, Menlo Park

135 Constitution Dr, Menlo Park, CA  ·  In-Person + Livestream
Workshop: "From Foundation to Intelligence — A Snowflake Interoperability & AI Workshop"
Register / Event Info →
Focus Areas

Enterprise AI & Interoperability

  • Built Snowflake's Interoperability offering — 5 WORM patterns for Snowflake + Databricks coexistence: External-First CLD, SF-Managed Iceberg, CDC Stream Sync, CLD + Cortex AI, Delta Direct
  • 5-part technical series in Snowflake Builders Blog · SHERPA Iceberg Playbook (16 modules) · WAF Open & Interoperable Lens (25 additions) · Cortex Code skill v5 (44+ downloads)
  • Apache Iceberg Compatibility Matrix: merged PR adding Snowflake Horizon Catalog across 19 platforms at icebergmatrix.org
  • AI production wins across Financial Services, Healthcare, Technology, and Philanthropy verticals — Agentic Finance AI, DocAI, Cortex Analyst, and Interoperability deployments
  • Blueprint Manager co-creator (Snowflake-Labs, announced Summit 2026); Iceberg SME

Industry Credentials

  • Retail & CPG: Sherwin-Williams — 10 yrs, $18.4B retail; Walmart & Kroger (YugaByte)
  • Energy: Weatherford International — $23M P&L, petabyte ops, Centro™, CygNet® SCADA, ForeSite® AI/ML
  • Financial Services: Fortune 50 banking and payments (YugaByte SE leadership)
  • Healthcare & AI: Production AI deployments — DocAI, Cortex Analyst, Agentic Finance AI
Career
Snowflake  ·  Sr. Manager, Solutions Architecture — US West
Head of Solutions Architecture, Enterprise AI & Interoperability
Oct 2025 – Present
  • Leads a Solutions Architecture team across enterprise accounts spanning Financial Services, Healthcare, Retail & CPG, and Technology verticals
  • Originated and built Snowflake's Interoperability offering — a repeatable WORM architecture framework enabling Snowflake + Databricks coexistence without migration or data duplication; 5 validated patterns covering External-First, SF-Managed Iceberg, CDC Sync, CLD + Cortex AI, and Delta Direct
  • Technical thought leadership: co-built Blueprint Manager (Snowflake-Labs, announced Summit 2026); Iceberg SME; authored SHERPA Iceberg Playbook; contributed to Snowflake's Well-Architected Framework; published on Snowflake Solutions + Labs; released Cortex Code skill for field self-service
  • Published 5-part Snowflake–Databricks Interoperability series in Snowflake Builders Blog; merged community OSS contribution to icebergmatrix.org — added Snowflake Horizon Catalog across 19 platforms
  • AI production deployments across Financial Services, Healthcare, Technology, and Philanthropy — Agentic Finance AI, Cortex Agent, DocAI, Cortex Analyst, and Interoperability in production
Weatherford International  ·  Sr. Director, Enterprise Data & Architecture
Head of Enterprise Data Platform & Data Governance
2024 – 2025
  • Owned AI-ready data infrastructure with $23M P&L; petabyte-scale operations for 300+ global developers across 5 SaaS energy products
  • Architected Centro™ (real-time drilling analytics), CygNet® SCADA (enterprise monitoring), ForeSite® (AI/ML production optimization), and Unified Data Model — multi-cloud: AWS, Azure, IoT/NVIDIA Jetson
  • Built the company's first Enterprise Data Governance & Data Quality Office: 100+ stakeholder interviews, 3–4 core policies ratified at Executive Council level
YugaByte DB  ·  Director of Sales Engineering — North Americas
Head of Sales Engineering, North America
2021 – 2024
  • Led NA SA team against $56M annual quota targeting Fortune 50 accounts across Financial Services, Retail, Media, and Manufacturing
  • Built and scaled the SE team from ground up; designed GTM motions across AWS, Azure, and GCP; grew partner revenue to $2M+ annually
  • Represented YugaByte at Snowflake Summit, Money 20/20, AWS re:Invent, Gartner D&A, and KubeCon
The Sherwin-Williams Company  ·  Global Head of Data Engineering
VP-Level: Data Engineering, DaaS, Retail Analytics
2011 – 2021
  • Built and led 70+ data engineers across 5 countries; Data-as-a-Service platform serving 60K+ users, supporting $4B+ quarterly retail operations
  • 1,300+ data pipelines processing 1PB+ daily; scaled Snowflake to 3,000+ Tableau users and 40+ data marts in 24 months
  • Architected consumer data flywheels, smart pipeline tooling, and automated data quality frameworks used across the $18.4B enterprise
Oracle Corp · Hitachi Consulting · Sierra Atlantic
Lead ETL Developer / Software Engineer
2006 – 2011
  • Data engineering and application delivery for Fortune 100 enterprises; ERP manufacturing, supply chain, and financial data pipelines across Latin America and North America
Core Skills
SE Team Leadership Sales Engineering Management AI/ML Architecture Agentic AI (Cortex) Snowflake Interoperability Apache Iceberg Databricks Coexistence Enterprise Account Strategy GTM Offering Development Data Governance Distributed Systems / DBaaS Technical Enablement at Scale Retail & CPG Energy & Resources Financial Services

Education

  • MBA, Finance
    Cleveland State University · 2015
  • Executive Leadership Certificate
    Case Western Reserve University · 2017

Recognition

  • ❄ Snowflake Data Super-Hero 2020–2023
  • SIM — Midwest RLF Class of 2020
  • Cleveland Leadership Center Civic Institute 2016

Boards & Civic

  • Esperanza Inc. — Board Chair, Governance 2017–2024
  • Diversity Center NE Ohio 2019–2023
  • CSU Alumni — Board Chair, 725 members

Industry Depth

  • Retail & CPG: Sherwin-Williams, Walmart, Kroger
  • Energy: Weatherford (oilfield, IoT, drilling)
  • Financial Services: Fortune 50 banking & payments
  • Healthcare: Production AI deployments
  • AI/SaaS & Technology: Agentic AI, Interoperability

Contact

Upcoming
June 2026
TechEquity AI Forum — Snowflake SVAI Hub
135 Constitution Dr, Menlo Park, CA  ·  In-Person + Livestream  ·  TechEquity AI Monthly Forum Series
Workshop: "From Foundation to Intelligence — A Snowflake Interoperability & AI Workshop"
Register / Event Info →
Past Talks & Interviews
AWS APN: YugabyteDB on AWS Graviton2024 · AWS APN Blog
Bright Founders Talk: DBaaS & the Future of Data Mgmt & AI2024 · Bright Founders
Consistency in an Interstellar Era: Earth to Mars2023 · YugaByte
What's New: YugabyteDB and AWS2023 · YugaByte + AWS
Unlocking Game-Changing Insights w/ Fivetran & Hashmap2021 · Fivetran / Hashmap
The Pillars of Data Engineering2022 · YugaByte
The Importance of Data Engineering2021 · Hashmap
Managing Data at Global ScaleBehind the Data Cloud · Snowflake
Conference Circuit
Snowflake Summit Gartner Data & Analytics MIT Sloan Data Symposium Oracle Open World Money20/20 Dell Tech World AWS re:Invent KubeCon PostgreSQL Conference CDO & Data Leaders Summit TechEquity AI Forum
Featured Series

Snowflake & Databricks Interoperability Series

A 5-part technical series published in the Snowflake Builders Blog covering the architecture, patterns, and AI integration for running Snowflake and Databricks together — without migration, without duplication. Built from real-world enterprise deployments across Financial Services, Philanthropy, Retail, and Technology verticals.

Part 1
8 Architecture Patterns for Write Once, Read Many
Part 2
Connecting Databricks Unity Catalog to Snowflake via Iceberg REST
Part 3
External-First CLD: Databricks Writes, Snowflake Reads
Part 4
SF-Managed Iceberg: Snowflake Writes, Databricks Reads
Part 5
CLD + Cortex AI: Adding Intelligence to the Interop Stack
Open Source
⚙️

Snowflake-Labs / blueprint-manager

Co-created Blueprint Manager — a self-service platform configuration tool guided by Snowflake SME best practices. Interactive workflows walk engineers through environment setup decisions, capture answers, and generate SQL and configuration tailored to their environment. Announced at Snowflake Summit 2026. Also includes the SHERPA Iceberg Playbook: 16 production-ready modules across all 5 interoperability patterns, with Cortex Agent CI validation.

● Published — Snowflake Labs Infrastructure as Code Platform Engineering Iceberg Patterns Best Practices
⭐ 34 stars 🍴 14 forks Snowflake-Labs/blueprint-manager
🧊

Apache Iceberg Compatibility Matrix — PR #9 (Merged)

Authored and merged the community contribution adding Snowflake Horizon Catalog as a named entry to icebergmatrix.org — the community-run Apache Iceberg compatibility reference used in enterprise evaluations. Documented read/write support across 19 platforms (Spark, Flink, Databricks, Athena, EMR, Glue, Azure Fabric, DuckDB, and others) for Iceberg REST V2 and V3. Reviewed and validated with Snowflake PM Ashwin Kamath and AWS Partner SA Angel Conde (maintainer).

● Merged — Community OSS Apache Iceberg Snowflake Horizon Catalog Iceberg REST 19 Platforms
Fork: sfc-gh-rbachala/iceberg-matrix Neuw84/iceberg-matrix · PR #9
Personal Repos
sfc-gh-rbachala / rbac-hardening-blueprint
RBAC Hardening blueprint for Snowflake Blueprint Manager — audit, harden, and monitor role-based access controls.
Jinja Snowflake-issued account
sfc-gh-rbachala / cost-management-blueprint
Cost Management & Optimization blueprint for Snowflake Blueprint Manager — analyze, optimize, and govern credit consumption across warehouses, serverless compute, and storage.
Jinja Snowflake-issued account
richiebachala / Databricks-and-Spark
Feature Engineering, Spark ML Random Forest, MLflow experiment tracking, and Streaming Data Sources — hands-on Databricks patterns.
Python ⭐ 5
Snowflake Engineering Blog
Snowflake Blog · 2024

Snowflake Horizon vs. Databricks Unity Catalog

A detailed technical comparison of governance capabilities: data discovery, lineage, access control, and compliance across both platforms.

Read Article → Snowflake Blog · 2024

Iceberg Catalog: Horizon vs. Unity Catalog

How Snowflake Horizon and Unity Catalog handle open table format governance, catalog interoperability, and multi-engine reads.

Read Article →
AWS Partner Network Blog
AWS APN Blog · 2024

YugabyteDB on AWS Graviton: The Winning Combination for Distributed SQL

22% better performance-per-price ratio on Graviton instances — PrivateLink architecture, security compliance, and deployment patterns for distributed SQL on AWS.

Read Article →
Medium — @richiebachala
Medium · 2022

Modern Data Modeling

10 rules for effective dimensional modeling in the cloud era — from star schemas to semantic layers.

Read → Medium · 2022

Snowflake vs. Redshift vs. BigQuery

Data-driven comparison of the three dominant cloud data warehouses across performance, cost, and enterprise fit.

Read → Medium · 2022

YugaByte: Where Data Lives Forever

YugabyteDB's architecture and how distributed SQL enables data durability and global consistency at scale.

Read → Medium · 2018

Tableau vs. Power BI

Strengths and weaknesses of the two dominant BI tools — focused on enterprise analytics use cases and business size fit.

Read →
Long-Form Features
Medium · Towards Data Science · 2021

Building a Data Engineering Center of Excellence

How to structure, scale, and operate a modern data engineering organization — frameworks, team design, and operating models drawn from building a 70+ person global DE team at Sherwin-Williams.

Read on Medium → Fivetran · Aug 2021

Richie Bachala: The Making of a Modern Data Leader at Sherwin-Williams

"To build all of the data sources and models would have taken three months. Fivetran cut that to four days." Feature by Theo Hopkinson on the Sherwin-Williams DaaS transformation.

Read Feature →
Blog · Nov 2023

The Future of Money and Financial Services

Five takeaways from Money 20/20 USA — AI ethics in banking, quantum computing's threat to encryption, embedded finance, and the balance of automation vs. human oversight.

Published Nov 14, 2023
Blog · Feb 2024

Azure Storage Performance: Deep Dive with Distributed Database Workloads

Benchmarking Azure Premium SSD, Premium SSD v2, and Ultra SSD under TPC-C workloads with YugabyteDB — practical guidance on disk type selection.

Published Feb 1, 2024
Initiative · 2024–2025

Building an Enterprise Data Governance & Data Quality Office

How I built the first enterprise-wide DG&DQ program at Weatherford — 100+ stakeholder interviews, NIST/GDPR/ISO alignment, Executive Council ratification.

Weatherford International, 2024

Let's Connect

Open to conversations about enterprise AI architecture, Snowflake Interoperability, building high-performing SE teams, or speaking opportunities across Retail, CPG, Energy, and Finance.

in
LinkedInlinkedin.com/in/richiebachala
M
Medium@richiebachala — Snowflake Builders Blog
🎤
Upcoming Talk — TechEquity AI ForumSnowflake SVAI Hub · Menlo Park · June 2026