About
Brett Parkin
Senior data engineer and BI consultant, based aboard a catamaran in Auckland — and working with clients wherever the work makes sense.
I've spent 20+ years across data engineering, business intelligence, financial analytics, and data warehouse architecture — mostly in SQL Server (SSAS, SSIS, SSRS, T-SQL) and Power BI, with WhereScape RED for warehouse automation, and I'm actively building depth in Snowflake, dbt, and Azure.
Before data engineering, I trained and worked as an audit clerk, and hold a B.Compt from the University of South Africa. That background shows up directly in the work — I'm comfortable in the numbers, not just the pipelines that move them, which matters most on finance-adjacent engagements.
My comparative advantage isn't encyclopaedic knowledge of every tool on the market. It's rapid learning and systems thinking — understanding an unfamiliar, messy environment quickly, and finding the practical path through it rather than the theoretically perfect one.
NZ · Australia · South Africa
NZ and South African citizenship, with Australian work rights via the Trans-Tasman arrangement — genuine eligibility across all three, not just remote-in-name-only.
Auckland, New Zealand
Living aboard Cat A Rac, based in Auckland. Comfortable working across timezones, and set up to work from wherever a client engagement or life takes us next.
How I approach the work
Honest about scope, direct about gaps.
I'd rather tell a client exactly what I do and don't know than overclaim and let it surface later. If a technology is new to me, I'll say so — and I'll also tell you how quickly I expect to be functionally competent in it, based on two decades of picking up what a job actually needs.
The engagements I do best are the ones with a real edge to them: a migration, an audit, an incident, a greenfield build. Ambiguous, messy problems are where I do my best work — not repetitive maintenance.