Panel: How AI Is Shifting Data Infrastructure Left | Joe Reis, Vin Vashishta, Carly Taylor, Chad Sanderson | Shift Left Data Conference 2025

The rapid rise of AI has dramatically elevated the value and strategic importance of data, transforming how upstream software engineers perceive and interact with data workflows. In this expert-led panel, industry leaders will share their experiences and insights into effectively bridging the gap between data teams and software engineers. They will discuss practical strategies for proactively managing data infrastructure, enhancing collaboration, and ensuring high-quality data to support advanced AI-driven development initiatives.

Shifting Left in Banking: Enhancing Machine Learning Models through Proactive Data Quality | Abhi Ghosh | Shift Left Data Conference 2025

Good Data and not Big Data is becoming more important in today's ecosystem. Machine Learning models rely on good quality data to make their model training more efficient and effective. We have traditionally applied Data Quality checks and balances in manual, centralized way, putting a lot of onus on our customers. Shifting Left Data Quality will bring the data quality checks closer to where data is being created, while preventing bad data from flowing downstream. Also auto-detecting, recommending and auto-enforcing data quality rules will make our customers job easier, while creating a more mature and robust data ecosystem.

Building a Scalable Data Foundation in Health Tech | Anna Swigart | Shift Left Data Conference 2025

In healthcare technology, protecting patient privacy while scaling data operations requires reimagining where quality and governance live. This presentation explores Helix's journey of shifting critical processes left in its precision medicine business—from implementing automated data classification and privacy workflows to enlisting cross-functional expertise in refining operational workflows. For clinical data management, we've partnered with healthcare systems to implement OMOP standards and data contracts at the source, creating a robust foundation for research and commercial opportunities. Through practical examples, we'll demonstrate how this upstream approach has transformed our data operations, encouraged internal alignment, and strengthened partner relationships.

The Rise of the Data-Conscious Software Engineer: Bridging the Data-Software Gap | Mark Freeman | Shift Left Data Conference 2025

Data teams increasingly embrace software engineering practices to address quality and integration challenges, yet friction remains between software and data teams. This talk explores why standard practices alone aren’t enough and introduces the concept of the “Data-Conscious Software Engineer,” an emerging role critical to bridging these organizational divides. Attendees will learn how identifying and empowering engineers who deeply understand both software development and data workflows can foster stronger collaboration, improve data quality, and drive organizational change toward treating data as a strategic asset.

Shift Left with Apache Iceberg Data Products to Power AI | Andrew Madson | Shift Left Data Conference 2025

High-quality, governed, and performant data from the outset is vital for agile, trustworthy enterprise AI systems. Traditional approaches delay addressing data quality and governance, causing inefficiencies and rework. Apache Iceberg, a modern table format for data lakes, empowers organizations to "Shift Left" by integrating data management best practices earlier in the pipeline to enable successful AI systems.

This session covers how Iceberg's schema evolution, time travel, ACID transactions, and Git-like data branching allow teams to validate, version, and optimize data at its source. Attendees will learn to create resilient, reusable data assets, streamline engineering workflows, enforce governance efficiently, and reduce late-stage transformations—accelerating analytics, machine learning, and AI initiatives.

Panel: Shift Left Across the Data Lifecycle—Data Contracts, Transformations, Observability, and Catalogs | Prukalpa Sankar, Tristan Handy, Barr Moses, Chad Sanderson | Shift Left Data Conference 2025

Join industry-leading CEOs Chad (Data Contracts), Tristan (Data Transformations), Barr (Data Observability), and Prukalpa (Data Catalogs) who are pioneering new approaches to operationalizing data by “Shifting Left.” This engaging panel will explore how embedding rigorous data management practices early in the data lifecycle reduces issues downstream, enhances data reliability, and empowers software engineers with clear visibility into data expectations. Attendees will gain insights into how data contracts define accountability, how effective transformations ensure data usability at scale, how proactive how proactive data and AI observability drives continuous confidence in data quality, and how catalogs enable data discoverability, accelerating innovation and trust across organizations.

Automating Data Quality via Shift Left for Real-Time Web Data Feeds at Industrial Scale | Sarah McKenna | Shift Left Data Conference 2025

Real-time web data is one of the hardest data streams to automate with trust since web sites don't want to be scraped, are constantly changing with no notice, and employ sophisticated bot blocking mechanisms to try to stop automated data collection. At Sequentum we cut our teeth on web data and have come out with a general purpose cloud platform for any type of data ingestion and data enrichment that our clients can transparently audit and ultimately trust to get their mission critical data delivered on time and with quality to fuel their business decision making.

Wayfair’s Multi-year Data Mesh Journey | Nachiket Mehta and Piyush Tiwari | Shift Left Data Conference 2025

Wayfair’s multi-year Data Mesh journey involved shifting from a monolithic, centralized data model to a decentralized, domain-driven architecture built on microservices. By embracing Data Mesh principles, Wayfair empowered domain teams to take end-to-end ownership of their data.

Key enablers included a data contract management platform ensure trusted, discoverable data products, and the development of Taxon, an internal ontology and knowledge graph that unified semantics across domains while supporting the company's tech modernization.

Organizationally, Wayfair introduced an Embedded Data Engineering model – embedding data engineers within domain teams – to instill a “Data-as-a-Product” mindset among data producers. This sociotechnical shift ensured that those who create data also own its quality, documentation, and evolution, rather than relying on a centralized BI team. As a result, Wayfair’s data producers are now accountable for well-defined, high-quality data products, and data consumers can more easily discover and trust data through the unified catalog and ontology.

The presentation will highlight how Wayfair has adopted the “shift left” (pushing data ownership and quality to the source teams) and next heading towards “shift right” (focusing on consumer-driven data products and outcomes) to unlock business outcomes. This session will share both technical strategies and business results from Wayfair’s Data Mesh journey.

Panel: State of the Data And AI Market | Apoorva Pandhi, Matt Turck, Chris Riccomini, Chad Sanderson | Shift Left Data Conference 2025

Artificial Intelligence is reshaping the landscape of software development, driving a fundamental shift towards empowering developers to take control earlier in the development lifecycle—known as "shift left." In this panel, venture capital leaders and industry experts will explore how emerging trends in AI and data technologies are influencing investment decisions, creating new opportunities, and transforming development workflows. Attendees will gain valuable insights into the evolving market dynamics, understand the strategic significance of shifting left in today's AI-driven world, and discover how organizations and developers can stay ahead in this rapidly changing environment.

Data Contracts in the Real World, the Adevinta Spain Implementation | Sergio Catoira | Shift Left Data Conference 2025

This talk covers Adevinta Spain's transition from a best-effort governance model to a governed data integration system by design. By creating source-aligned data products, this shift aims to enhance data quality and reliability from the moment data is ingested.

Shifting From Reactive to Proactive at Glassdoor | Zakariah Siyaji | Shift Left Data Conference 2025

As Glassdoor scaled to petabytes of data, ensuring data quality became critical for maintaining trust and supporting strategic decisions. Glassdoor implemented a proactive, “shift left” strategy focused on embedding data quality practices directly into the development process. This talk will detail how Glassdoor leveraged data contracts, static code analysis integrated into the CI/CD pipeline, and automated anomaly detection to empower software engineers and prevent data issues at the source. Attendees will learn how proactive data quality management reduces risk, promotes stronger collaboration across teams, enhances operational efficiency, and fosters a culture of trust in data at scale.

Data DevOps applies rigorous software development practices—such as version control, automated testing, and governance—to data workflows, empowering software engineers to proactively manage data changes and address data-related issues directly within application code. By adopting a "shift left" approach with Data DevOps, SWE teams become more aware of data requirements, dependencies, and expectations early in the software development lifecycle, significantly reducing risks, improving data quality, and enhancing collaboration.

This session will provide practical strategies for integrating Data DevOps into application development, enabling teams to build more robust data products and accelerate adoption of production AI systems.