Dr. Rana Faisal Munir's Blog

Short BIO:

As a Senior Data Engineer at Pepsico, Dr. Rana Faisal Munir leverages his extensive experience and research background in big data to develop data pipelines that support data analysis and data science projects. He has previously worked as a Senior Data Engineer in Glovo, where he delivered data solutions for various business needs. He is also an active researcher in the field of big data, with a focus on optimizing data-intensive workflows on distributed processing systems such as Hadoop and Spark. He has published several papers on topics such as polyglot systems, storage layouts, web application security, and semantic web. In addition, he is proficient in various big data technologies such as Hadoop ecosystem, Apache Spark, Elastic search and MongoDB. He also has a solid software development experience of 5 years in Java and .Net.na Faisal Munir is a Senior Data Engineer at Pepsico. Before joining Pepsico, he was working as a Senior Data Engineer in Glovo where he was responsible of developing data pipelines to help data analysts and data scientists with their data requirements. Apart from his industrial experience, he also involved in different research topics related to big data. His research work mainly focuses on optimizing data-intensive workflows running on distributed processing systems (such as Hadoop and Spark). His research interests also include polyglot systems, storage layouts, web application security, and semantic web. Moreover, he has expertise on different big data systems such as Hadoop ecosystem, Apache Spark, Elastic search and MongoDB. He also has 5 years of software industry experience as Java and .Net developer.

Long BIO:

Dr. Rana Faisal Munir obtained his graduation degree in Computer Science (BSCS) in 2007 from Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan, with third highest award. Afterwards, he joined Relax Solutions, a software firm based in Pakistan, and worked as a Software Engineer (Asp.Net) for one year. During this period, he was involved in both back-end and front-end development of different e-commerce portals.

In November 2008, he started his master degree in Information Technology (MSIT) from NUST School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS). During his master, he also joined a research project “Semantic based Web Application Firewall (SWAF)” as a Java Developer. In this project, he worked on building an ontology for web application attacks and used it in web application firewall to detect possible attacks. He also did his master thesis “Enhancing Semantic Rule Engine for Semantic based Web Application Firewall” in the same project under the supervision of Dr. Khalid Latif and finished his master degree with first position in March 2012.

After his master degree, he joined NESCOM, a public sector R&D organization as Assistant Manager, where he was part of a research team that was actively working on the latest open source technologies in cloud computing. He left NESCOM in August 2014 and moved to Madrid, Spain in November 2014 to join IMDEA Software Institute as Research Intern. During this tenure, he worked on “Detecting Reverse Proxies in Malicious Infrastructure” under the supervision of Dr. Juan Caballero.

Dr. Munir started his PhD studies under the European Commission funded Erasmus Mundus joint degree doctoral program, known as Information Technology for Business Intelligence (IT4BI-DC) at Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya (UPC), Spain as home university and Technische Universität Dresden (TUD), Germany as host university. He pursued his PhD entitled “Storage Format Selection and Optimization for Materialized Intermediate Results in Data-Intensive Flows” under the supervision of Professor Alberto Abelló (UPC), Professor Oscar Romero (UPC), and Professor Wolfgang Lehner (TUD). As part of his joint PhD, he visited TUD, his host university, to work in Dresden Database Group under the supervision of Professor Wolfgang Lehner (October 2016 – May 2017).

His PhD research work focuses on optimizing data-intensive workflows running on distributed processing systems (such as Hadoop and Spark). The outcomes of his PhD research work has been published in peer-reviewed international conferences and journals. His research interests also include polyglot systems, storage layouts, web application security, and semantic web.