Data engineering
Pipelinesthatsurviverealvolume
Ingestion, warehousing and transformation that hold up against late data, schema drift and the traffic you have not had yet.
A pipeline that works on a clean sample is not a pipeline. The job is what happens on the day a supplier changes a column type without telling you, three days of events arrive at once, and the dashboard the board is reading is wrong.
You might recognise
- Numbers that disagree depending on which dashboard you open
- A nightly job that fails quietly and is noticed on a Tuesday
- Backfills that take a week and lock out everything else
- Warehouse spend nobody can attribute to a team or a query
How we work through it
- 01
Model the contracts
Explicit schemas at every boundary, with validation that fails loudly at ingestion rather than silently at the dashboard. Most data quality incidents are contract violations that were allowed through.
- 02
Make it idempotent
Every stage safe to re-run, every partition rebuildable. Backfills stop being events and become routine.
- 03
Handle lateness explicitly
Watermarks and restatement windows decided deliberately rather than discovered during an incident.
- 04
Attribute the cost
Tagged workloads and query-level attribution, so warehouse spend is a decision instead of a surprise.
What you are left holding
Everything ships into your repositories and your cloud. There is no runtime dependency on us after handover — that is the point.
- The pipeline, orchestrated and version-controlled in your stack
- Data quality tests running on every load, with alerting that names the owner
- Documented schemas and lineage
- Cost attribution by team and by workload
- Runbooks for the failures that will actually happen
Questions we get
- Do we need to move to a new warehouse?
- Usually not. Most of the problems we are called about are modelling and orchestration problems, and migrating the warehouse would carry them along unchanged.
- Can you work alongside our data team?
- That is the normal arrangement. We tend to build the first two or three pipelines with your engineers so the patterns stay after we leave.
Have a problem shaped like this?
Thirty minutes, no deck. Bring the thing that is not working and we will tell you what we would do about it — including when the answer is that you do not need us.
We reply within one business day