When Prateek Chawla, founding engineer, joined Monte Carlo in 2019, he was responsible for spinning up our data platform from scratch. He was more of a backend/cloud engineer, but like with any startup had to wear many hats, so got the opportunity to play the role of data engineer too. In this talk, we’ll walk through how we spun up Monte Calro’s data stack with Snowflake, Looker, and dbt, touching on how and why we implemented dbt (and later, dbt Cloud), key use cases, and handy tricks for integrating dbt with other popular tools, like Airflow, and Spark. We’ll discuss what worked, what didn’t work, and other lessons learned along the way, as well as share how our data stack evolved over time to scale to meet the demands of our growing startup. We’ll also touch on a very critical component of the dbt value proposition, data quality testing, and discuss some of our favorite tests and what we’ve done to automate and integrate them with other elements of our stack.

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

Testing is an important part of the DataOps life cycle, giving teams confidence in the integrity of their data as it moves downstream to production systems. But what happens when testing doesn’t catch all of your bad data and “unknown unknown” data quality issues fall through the cracks? Fortunately, data engineers can apply a thing or two from DevOps best practices to tackle data quality at scale with circuit breakers, a novel approach to stopping bad data from actually entering your pipelines in the first place. In this talk, Prateek Chawla, Founding Team Member and Technical Lead at Monte Carlo, will discuss what circuit breakers are, how to integrate them with your Airflow DAGs, and what this looks like in practice. Time permitting, Prateek will also walk through how to build and automate Airflow circuit breakers across multiple cascading pipelines with Python and other common tools.