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.

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 12-person SA team (IC3–IC5) across 17 enterprise accounts; 206,938+ AI credits generated Q4 FY26
Originated and built Snowflake's Interoperability offering: 5 validated WORM patterns — External-First CLD, SF-Managed Iceberg, CDC Stream Sync, CLD + Cortex AI, Delta Direct — enabling Snowflake + Databricks coexistence without migration or duplication
Authored SHERPA Iceberg Playbook (16 modules, 9-person SME team); contributed 25 additions to Snowflake's Well-Architected Framework Open & Interoperable Lens; released Cortex Code skill $snowflake-interoperability (v5, 44+ downloads)
Published 5-part Interoperability series in Snowflake Builders Blog; co-built Blueprint Manager (announced Summit 2026); Iceberg SME; published on Snowflake Solutions + Labs
Merged PR #9 to icebergmatrix.org — added Snowflake Horizon Catalog across 19 platforms in the community Apache Iceberg compatibility reference
AI production wins across Financial Services, Healthcare, Technology, and Philanthropy verticals — Agentic Finance AI, Zoom Cortex Agent, DocAI + Cortex Analyst, and Interoperability deployments in production
3 global SA enablement sessions on Interoperability, 200+ attendees across all sessions

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

richiebachala / Databricks-and-Spark

Feature Engineering, Spark ML Random Forest, MLflow experiment tracking, and Streaming Data Sources — hands-on Databricks patterns.

Python ⭐ 5

richiebachala / SnowflakeODI

Migration into Snowflake using Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) 12.2 — patterns built from Sherwin-Williams enterprise migration work.

Python ⭐ 4

richiebachala / python-for-snowflakeDB

Python patterns and utilities for working with Snowflake — connectors, query helpers, and data engineering utilities.

Python ⭐ 1

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

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

Quotes & Passages

Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.

— Mother Teresa

Building great things means taking risks.

— Richard Feynman

It is our responsibility as scientists — knowing the great progress that is the fruit of freedom of thought — to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed, and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.

— Richard Feynman

At some point in life, we have to figure out who we are. The sooner we do it the better, so we can pursue the opportunities that are right for us, not some false dream created by others.

— Averell Harriman

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

— Steve Jobs

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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