Talha IjlalTalha Ijlal

Experience

Roles and measured outcomes.

Jul 2024 to Present

Lead Data Engineer

DigiLawyer

Founding/early data engineer building the ingestion + structuring layer and retrieval stack for a legal research product. The work spans messy sources, strict correctness requirements, and the day-to-day operational reality of keeping pipelines and search stable as usage grows.

Primary Impact

  • Built high-throughput ingestion pipelines for Pakistan’s legal corpus (statutes + related materials), turning fragmented PDFs/HTML into structured, queryable records.
  • Designed the retrieval layer (full-text + semantic/vector retrieval), with attention to latency, debuggability, and evaluation consistency.
  • Helped scale the product as it grew from roughly ~1k users to ~16k users, where search quality and data freshness were directly user-facing.
  • Led the work functionally as “head of data” with a small team (1 full-time teammate and multiple interns), focusing on documentation and operational discipline.

Core Technologies

PythonPostgreSQLAirflowpgvectorFull-text searchQdrantMeiliSearchScrapingBeautifulSoupDockerKubernetesLinuxAWS (EKS/EC2)
Jun 2023 to Jul 2024

Data Engineer

Adara (RateGain)

Data engineering in a high-volume advertising pipeline environment. My focus was operational reliability: automated monitoring, consistent checks, and fast identification of delivery failures.

Primary Impact

  • Automated delivery-failure detection and case creation (Salesforce), cutting manual monitoring effort by over 90%.
  • Built and maintained Airflow/Google Composer workflows that supported delivery to 50–60 downstream destinations (e.g., DV360, Trade Desk, Yahoo).
  • Implemented recurring reporting and file-based runner workflows (including BigQuery checks, Compute Engine jobs, and SFTP delivery flows) handling ~100 files/day.

Core Technologies

PythonAirflowCloud ComposerBigQueryGoogle CloudGoogle APIsPandasSFTPSalesforce