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.