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.

Airflow 3 is here, bringing a new era of flexibility, scalability, and security to data orchestration. This release makes building, running, and managing data pipelines easier than ever. In this session, we will cover the key benefits of Airflow 3, including: (1) Ease of Use: Airflow 3 rethinks the user experience—from an intuitive, upgraded UI to DAG Versioning and scheduler-integrated backfills that let teams manage pipelines more effectively than ever before (2) Stronger Security: By decoupling task execution from direct database connections, Airflow 3 enforces task isolation and minimal-privilege access. This meets stringent compliance standards while reducing the risk of unauthorized data exposure. (3) Ultimate Flexibility: Run tasks anywhere, anytime with remote execution and event-driven scheduling. Airflow 3 is designed for global, heterogeneous modern data environments with an architecture that facilitates edge and hybrid-cloud to GPU-based deployments.