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Steven Hillion

Speaker

Steven Hillion

2

talks

SVP Data and AI Astronomer

Steven Hillion is Head of Data at Astronomer, the New York-based company behind Apache Airflow. He has led engineering and analytics teams for twenty years, founded Alpine Data (acquired by TIBCO), and built a global data science team at Pivotal while developing ML software across startups. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from UC Berkeley after studying mathematics at Oxford, and is originally from Guernsey, now based in San Francisco.

Bio from: Data + AI Summit 2025

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Sponsored by: Astronomer | Scaling Data Teams for the Future

The role of data teams and data engineers is evolving. No longer just pipeline builders or dashboard creators, today’s data teams must evolve to drive business strategy, enable automation, and scale with growing demands. Best practices seen in the software engineering world (Agile development, CI/CD, and Infrastructure-as-code) from the DevOps movement are gradually making their way into data engineering. We believe these changes have led to the rise of DataOps and a new wave of best practices that will transform the discipline of data engineering. But how do you transform a reactive team into a proactive force for innovation? We’ll explore the key principles for building a resilient, high-impact data team—from structuring for collaboration, testing, automation, to leveraging modern orchestration tools. Whether you’re leading a team or looking to future-proof your career, you’ll walk away with actionable insights on how to stay ahead in the rapidly changing data landscape.

ML Ops: Operationalizing Data Science

More than half of the analytics and machine learning (ML) models created by organizations today never make it into production. Instead, many of these ML models do nothing more than provide static insights in a slideshow. If they aren’t truly operational, these models can’t possibly do what you’ve trained them to do. This report introduces practical concepts to help data scientists and application engineers operationalize ML models to drive real business change. Through lessons based on numerous projects around the world, six experts in data analytics provide an applied four-step approach—Build, Manage, Deploy and Integrate, and Monitor—for creating ML-infused applications within your organization. You’ll learn how to: Fulfill data science value by reducing friction throughout ML pipelines and workflows Constantly refine ML models through retraining, periodic tuning, and even complete remodeling to ensure long-term accuracy Design the ML Ops lifecycle to ensure that people-facing models are unbiased, fair, and explainable Operationalize ML models not only for pipeline deployment but also for external business systems that are more complex and less standardized Put the four-step Build, Manage, Deploy and Integrate, and Monitor approach into action