Over the past three years, Netflix has built a catalog of 100+ mobile and cloud games across TV, mobile and web platforms. With both internal and external studios contributing to this diverse ecosystem, building a robust game analytics platform became crucial for gaining insights into player behavior, optimizing game performance and driving member engagement.In this talk, we’ll share our journey of building Netflix’s Game Analytics platform from the ground up. We’ll highlight key decisions around data strategy, such as whether to develop an in-house solution or adopt an external service. We’ll discuss the challenges of balancing developer autonomy with data integrity and the complexities of managing data contracts for custom game telemetry, with an emphasis on self-service analytics. Attendees will learn how the Games Data team navigated these challenges, the lessons learned and the trade-offs involved in building a multi-tenant data ecosystem that supports diverse stakeholders.

Now the largest automaker in the United States, selling more than 2.7 million vehicles in 2024, General Motors is setting a bold vision for its future, with Software-defined vehicles and AI as a driving force. With data as a crucial asset, a transformation of this scale calls for a modern approach to Data Governance. Join Sherri Adame, Enterprise Data Governance Leader at General Motors, to learn about GM’s novel governance approach, supported by technologies like Atlan and Databricks. Hear how Sherri and her team are shifting governance to the left with automation, implementing data contracts, and accelerating data product discovery across domains, creating a cultural shift that emphasizes data as a competitive advantage.

Learn how Danone, a global leader in the food industry, improved its data-sharing processes using Delta Sharing, an open protocol developed by Databricks. This session will explore how Danone migrated from a traditional hub-and-spoke model to a more efficient and scalable data-sharing approach that works seamlessly across regions and platforms. We’ll discuss practical concepts such as in-region and cross-region data sharing, fine-grained access control, data discovery, and the implementation of data contracts. You’ll also hear about the strategies Danone uses to deliver governed data efficiently while maintaining compliance with global regulations. Additionally, we’ll discuss a cost comparison between direct data access and replication. Finally, we’ll share insights into the challenges faced by global organizations in managing data sharing at scale and how Danone addressed these issues. Attendees will gain practical knowledge on building a reliable and secure data-sharing framework for international collaboration.

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.

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.

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.

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.

🌟 Session Overview 🌟

Session Name: Data Contracts In Practice With Debezium and Apache Flink Speaker: Gunnar Morling Session Description: Log-based change data capture (CDC) is an invaluable part of the data engineering toolbox: it enables a variety of use cases such as real-time analytics, full-text search, or cache invalidation by publishing data change events from your database. But when publishing change event streams across context or team boundaries, aren’t you tying external consumers to your application’s data model, thus limiting yourself in evolving the same?

Enter data contracts—consciously designed abstractions between your internal data model and the outside world. Come and join us for this session to learn about:

Challenges you may encounter when exposing table-level change event streams and how data contracts can mitigate them Implementation strategies for data contracts, such as the outbox pattern and stream processing Evolving your data model and the corresponding data contracts without breaking any existing consumers We’ll also touch on some advanced topics at the intersection of CDC and stream processing, such as hydrating partial change events, using the popular change stream processing duo of Debezium and Apache Flink.

🚀 About Big Data and RPA 2024 🚀

Unlock the future of innovation and automation at Big Data & RPA Conference Europe 2024! 🌟 This unique event brings together the brightest minds in big data, machine learning, AI, and robotic process automation to explore cutting-edge solutions and trends shaping the tech landscape. Perfect for data engineers, analysts, RPA developers, and business leaders, the conference offers dual insights into the power of data-driven strategies and intelligent automation. 🚀 Gain practical knowledge on topics like hyperautomation, AI integration, advanced analytics, and workflow optimization while networking with global experts. Don’t miss this exclusive opportunity to expand your expertise and revolutionize your processes—all from the comfort of your home! 📊🤖✨

📅 Yearly Conferences: Curious about the evolution of QA? Check out our archive of past Big Data & RPA sessions. Watch the strategies and technologies evolve in our videos! 🚀 🔗 Find Other Years' Videos: 2023 Big Data Conference Europe https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqYhGsQ9iSEpb_oyAsg67PhpbrkCC59_g 2022 Big Data Conference Europe Online https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqYhGsQ9iSEryAOjmvdiaXTfjCg5j3HhT 2021 Big Data Conference Europe Online https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqYhGsQ9iSEqHwbQoWEXEJALFLKVDRXiP

💡 Stay Connected & Updated 💡

Don’t miss out on any updates or upcoming event information from Big Data & RPA Conference Europe. Follow us on our social media channels and visit our website to stay in the loop!

🌐 Website: https://bigdataconference.eu/, https://rpaconference.eu/ 👤 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bigdataconf, https://www.facebook.com/rpaeurope/ 🐦 Twitter: @BigDataConfEU, @europe_rpa 🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/73234449/admin/dashboard/, https://www.linkedin.com/company/75464753/admin/dashboard/ 🎥 YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/@DATAMINERLT

Jonny will showcase how the team at EQT, one of the world's largest private equity firms, is leveraging the dbt Discovery API, data contracts, tagging, and other dbt features to power discovery through their intranet — and by extension, how this also enables the team to support LLMs for live querying of their data.

Speaker: Jonny Reichwald Analytics Lead EQT

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements

Data contracts have been much discussed in the community of late, with a lot of curiosity around how to approach this concept in practice and how it might enable shift-left developer-first governance and data quality. For organizations adopting dbt while also dealing with non-dbt data that is upstream of the warehouse, it can be challenging to understand how to apply data contracts uniformly across a fragmented stack. We are calling this harmonizing layer the Control Plane for Data - powered by the common thread across these systems: metadata.

In this talk, Shirshanka Das, CTO of Acryl Data and founder of the DataHub Project describes how you can use data contracts and DataHub to make your dbt centered stack more reliable - as well as other use cases that can help build a simpler, more flexible data stack.

Speaker: Shirshanka Das, CTO, Acryl Data

Register for Coalesce at https://coalesce.getdbt.com

Surfline uses Segment to collect product analytics events to understand how surfers use their forecasts and live surf cameras across 9000+ surf spots worldwide. An open source tool was developed to define and manage product analytics event schemas using JSON schema which are used to build dbt staging models for all events.

With this solution, the data team has more time to build intermediate and mart models in dbt, knowing that our staging layer fully reflects Surfline’s product analytics events. This presentation is a real-life example on how schemas (or data contracts) can be used as a medium to build consensus, enforce standards, improve data quality, and speed up the dbt workflow for product analytics.

Speaker: Greg Clunies, Senior Analytics Engineer, Surfline

Register for Coalesce at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/

ABOUT THE TALK: After two years, three rounds of funding, and hundreds of new employees — Whatnot’s modern data stack has come from not existing to processing tens of millions of events across hundreds of different event types each day.

How does their small (but mighty!) team keep up? This talk explores data contracts — it covers the use of Interface Definition Language (Protobuf) to serve as the source of truth for event definitions, govern event construction in production, automatically generate DBT models in the data warehouse.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Zack Klein is a software engineer at Whatnot, where he thoroughly enjoys building data products and narrowly avoiding breaking production each day. Previously, he worked on big data platforms at Blackstone and HBO.

ABOUT DATA COUNCIL: Data Council (https://www.datacouncil.ai/) is a community and conference series that provides data professionals with the learning and networking opportunities they need to grow their careers.

Make sure to subscribe to our channel for the most up-to-date talks from technical professionals on data related topics including data infrastructure, data engineering, ML systems, analytics and AI from top startups and tech companies.

FOLLOW DATA COUNCIL: Twitter: https://twitter.com/DataCouncilAI LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/datacouncil-ai/

Metrics are the most important primitive in the data world and driving the use of powerful and reliable metrics is the best way data teams can add value to their enterprises. In this talk, we'll walk through how data teams can best support the metric lifecycle, end-to-end from:

1. Designing useful metrics as part of metric trees
2. Developing these metrics off stable and standard data contracts
3. Operationalizing metrics to drive value

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Abhi Sivasailam is a Growth and Analytics leader who most recently led Product-Led Growth, Product Analytics, and Analytics Engineering at Flexport, where he helped to lead these and other functions through 10x growth over the past 3 years. Previously, Abhi led growth and data teams at Keap, Hustle, and Honeybook.

👉 Sign up for our “No BS” Newsletter to get the latest technical data & AI content: https://datacouncil.ai/newsletter

ABOUT DATA COUNCIL: Data Council (https://www.datacouncil.ai/) is a community and conference series that provides data professionals with the learning and networking opportunities they need to grow their careers.

Make sure to subscribe to our channel for the most up-to-date talks from technical professionals on data related topics including data infrastructure, data engineering, ML systems, analytics and AI from top startups and tech companies.

FOLLOW DATA COUNCIL: Twitter: https://twitter.com/DataCouncilAI LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/datacouncil-ai/

ABOUT THE TALK: Data Contracts are a mechanism for driving accountability and data ownership between producers and consumers. Contracts are used to ensure production-grade data pipelines are treated as part of the product and have clear SLAs and ownership.

Learn about the why, when and how of Data Contracts and the spectrum from culture change to implementation details.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Chad Sanderson is the former Head of Data at Convoy. He has implemented Data Contracts at scale on everything from Machine Learning models to Embedded Metrics. He currently operates the Data Quality Camp Slack group.

ABOUT DATA COUNCIL: Data Council (https://www.datacouncil.ai/) is a community and conference series that provides data professionals with the learning and networking opportunities they need to grow their careers.

Make sure to subscribe to our channel for the most up-to-date talks from technical professionals on data related topics including data infrastructure, data engineering, ML systems, analytics and AI from top startups and tech companies.

FOLLOW DATA COUNCIL: Twitter: https://twitter.com/DataCouncilAI LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/datacouncil-ai/

The "socio" is inseparable from the "technical". In fact, technological change often begets social and organizational change.

And in the data space, the technical changes that some now refer to as the "modern data stack" call for changes in how teams work with data, and in turn how data specialists work within those teams. Enter the Modern Data Team.

In this talk, Abhi Sivasailam will unpack the changing landscape of data roles and teams and what this looks like in action at Flexport. Come learn how Flexport approaches data contracts, management, and governance, and the central role that Analytics Engineers and Product Analysts play in these processes.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Sgm3J6EkeKQf5D1MKopsLLAMOhAZ05CxDlei2mbDE90/edit#slide=id.g16424dcc8d3_0_1145

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