Cloud & Data Engineering Services

Manuel Acosta – Senior Cloud & Data Engineer

I offer consulting, contract, and freelance work in cloud infrastructure and data engineering — primarily on AWS. With over 9 years of experience, I specialize in the areas where infrastructure and data meet: building pipelines, modernizing legacy architectures, cutting cloud costs, and delivering systems that actually stay up.

Recent work includes cutting Aurora RDS costs by 73% (from ~$7,000 to ~$1,900/month) through a zero-downtime PostgreSQL v13 → v17 upgrade and storage migration — and leading the data engineering platform at Crabi, an insurtech company, from scratch.

AWS Certifications

AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate badge

AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer

Associate

AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate badge

AWS Certified Data Engineer

Associate

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate badge

AWS Certified Solutions Architect

Associate

What I Offer

Data Engineering & Pipelines

Building and modernizing data pipelines on AWS — Glue ETL, Step Functions, DMS, Redshift, and event-driven CDC architectures. I migrate teams from full-load batch jobs to incremental processing, cutting compute time, storage costs, and data latency. I also design gold-layer data warehouses with embedded QuickSight analytics.

Cloud Architecture & Serverless

Designing and building serverless and container-based architectures on AWS — Lambda, API Gateway, EKS, and CDK/Terraform for infrastructure as code. Whether you are starting from scratch, migrating from another provider, or modernizing a monolith, I design systems that are scalable and operationally lean.

Cloud Cost Optimization

Identifying and eliminating cloud waste through storage class migration, instance right-sizing, query tuning (Aurora PostgreSQL, Redshift), and architectural refactoring. I do not just flag the waste — I implement the fix. Recent results include $61K+/year in recurring savings for a HealthTech client.

DevOps & CI/CD

Designing automated deployment pipelines using GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline, and the Serverless Framework. Containerized microservices in Go and Python with hexagonal architecture patterns. I can take a team from manual deployments to a reliable, repeatable delivery process.

Why Work With Me?

With over 9 years of experience across startups and enterprise environments, I bring hands-on depth in the areas that matter most for modern cloud and data teams. A few specifics:

  • AWS-first expertise: The majority of my production work is on AWS, including multi-account organizations, EKS, Glue, Redshift, Lambda, and RDS.
  • Three AWS certifications: Solutions Architect, Data Engineer, and Machine Learning Engineer — all Associate level.
  • Results with numbers: 73% RDS cost reduction, $61K+/year in savings, data pipeline latency cut from hours to minutes.
  • Tech lead experience: I have led engineering and data teams, not just written the code — I understand delivery, prioritization, and cross-functional alignment.
  • Freelance-ready: Currently available for consulting engagements and contract work alongside my full-time role.

Ready to Get Started?

Whether you are dealing with runaway cloud costs, a data pipeline that needs modernizing, or an infrastructure migration — let's talk. I am available for short-term consultancy and longer-term contract work.

Contact Me Today