I'd rather run my own Kafka than rent your dashboards.
Ali Dbouk — data engineer, ML researcher, and operator of an unreasonably ambitious one-person VPS. Based in Beirut. Currently QA Data Engineer at AIAEC, building zoning-compliance RAG / GraphRAG systems and the QA dashboard that supervises them.
Career
2026 — present
QA Data Engineer · AIAEC
Scraping pipelines for US city zoning ordinances feeding a RAG/GraphRAG chatbot. Architected the QA Dashboard on PostgREST + Caddy + versioned SQL views — see the case study.
2025 — 2026
Data Engineer · Thales
Production data pipelines and platform work.
2024 — 2025
ML Research Engineer Intern · CNRS GeoAI Group
MSc thesis on CNN/GAN architectures for satellite-image super-resolution. Comparative study on Sentinel-2 imagery; PSNR / SSIM evaluation at 4× scale.
2024
Data & Analytics Intern · Dar Al-Handasah
Internal analytics on engineering operations data.
Education
| Degree | Field | Institution | Years |
|---|---|---|---|
| MSc | AI & Data Engineering | Lebanese University | 2024 — 2025 |
| BEc | Computer & Communication Engineering | Lebanese University | 2020 — 2025 |
Certifications
● Azure AZ-900◐ Azure DP-203 · in progress
Currently
Reading
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications — Kleppmann, second pass
- The Data Engineering Cookbook — Wessels
- arXiv: recent papers on GraphRAG retrieval evaluation
Tinkering with
- Iceberg compaction tuning on small files
- Citation-verifier prompt strategies for the zoning RAG
- Promtail + Loki for pipeline-level log search