Irfaan Sulaiman

I'm a Solutions and Data Architect with over 25 years of experience designing enterprise cloud, hybrid, and data platforms, plus 2 years of hands-on experience building production AI/LLM systems. My background spans cloud migrations, ETL/ELT pipeline architecture, data warehousing, and full-stack software engineering (15 years), giving me both the strategic and implementation-level view of the systems I design. Two things I've achieved: As sole Data Architect at Condorgreen, I owned every design and governance decision for a greenfield GCP data and analytics pipeline, delivering a fully operational ETL pipeline within a 4-month contract window and validating it end-to-end against the client's requirements. And at Offernet, I led and mentored a team of 4 Data Engineers while architecting two production AI chatbots (Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp) using Python, Cloud Functions, BigQuery, and Gemini AI — designing a reusable prompt/RAG framework that let new client niches be onboarded without re-engineering the core pipeline. I've also directed dual-cloud architecture for MTN's MyMTN and MTN Play platforms across GCP and Azure over a 30-month engagement, and led architecture and delivery teams of up to 21 people across South Africa, the UK, the US, Zimbabwe, and Namibia over a 32-year career, most recently at Old Mutual. What I want next: a remote or hybrid Data Architect, Data Engineer, or AI/LLM Engineering role where I can own meaningful data infrastructure end-to-end — ideally somewhere I can combine deep architectural judgment with hands-on implementation, and where the work has real-world stakes rather than purely internal metrics. I'm comfortable operating as a sole architect on lean teams or leading larger cross-functional groups, and I'm quick to pick up new tools (dbt, Databricks, etc.) where they fit the stack.