Nick Schrock

Nick is the founder of Dagster Labs, the startup behind Dagster, a popular open-source, data orchestration platform. Originally its CEO, Nick now serves as its CTO and Chairman. Prior to Dagster Labs he was a Principal Engineer and Director at Facebook from 2009 to 2017, where he founded the Product Infrastructure team and co-created GraphQL.

Topics

• The present and future of data engineering
• Data engineering best practices: building engineering tools for engineers
• The Engineering Founder’s dilemma: to lead the vision or run the company?
• The operational convergence of ML, AI and data engineering
• The delicate balance of an open-core business model

Prior appearances

• Present & Future of Data Engineering | Alter Everything
• How to Work Effectively With Your Data Teams With Nick Schrock, Founder and CTO of Dagster Labs | Data Unlocked
• The Orchestration Layer as the Data Platform Control Plane With Nick Schrock of Dagster Labs | The Data Stack Show
• Bringing Great Developer Experience to Data Teams | Open Source Startup Podcast
• How I Became a Software Developer @ Facebook | Honeypot
• Fireside Chat | Data Driven NYC
• Software-defined assets | The Data Exchange
• Modern Data Stack: Technology, Methodology, or both? | Catalog & Cocktails
• The Future of Open Source in the Era of SaaS | a16z live
• Re-Bundling The Data Stack | Data Engineering Podcast

Pete Hunt

Pete joined Dagster Labs as head of engineering in early 2022, and took over the reins as CEO in November of that year. Pete was previously co-founder and CEO of Smyte, an anti-abuse provider that was acquired by Twitter. Prior to his Pete led Instagram’s web team, built Instagram’s business analytics products, and helped to open source Facebook’s React.js.

Topics

• Building and leading a data engineering team
• Engineering hard choices: selecting an app’s tech stack
• The transition from engineering to CEO (and back, then back again)
• Building out a commercial cloud offering from an open-source base

Prior appearances

• The Journey from Engineer to CEO and Lessons Learned Along the Way with Pete Hunt | That Tech Pod
• Pete Hunt, CEO of Dagster Labs/Dagster | The Craft Of Open Source
• Open source data orchestration | The Tech Trek Podcast
• Seven Years of Reconsidering Best Practices | React Podcast
• The Secrets of React's Virtual DOM | codegram
• How React got traction | The Swyx Mixtape
• Rethinking Best Practices | JSConf EU
• Facebook engineering | Software Engineering Daily

Sandy Ryza

Sandy is a lead engineer, author, and thought leader in the domain of data engineering. Sandy co-wrote “Advanced Analytics with PySpark” and “Advanced Analytics with Spark”. He led ML and data science teams at Cloudera, Remix, Clover Health, and KeepTruckin.

Sandy is currently the lead engineer on the Dagster project, an open-source data orchestration platform used in MLOps, data science, IOT and analytics. Sandy is a regular speaker at data engineering and ML conferences.

Topics

• Data engineering in a post-Hadoop world
• The move to declarative and functional programming in data engineering
• The convergence of ML, data science, and data engineering
• The role of data engineering in the modern enterprise

Prior appearances

• Machine Learning Pipelines Are Still Data Pipelines with Sandy Ryza of Dagster | The Data Stack Show
• Build More Reliable Machine Learning Systems With The Dagster Orchestration Engine | the Machine Learning Podcast
• Software-defined assets in Dagster | Data Council 2022
• Rethinking Orchestration as Reconciliation | Data + AI Summit 2022
• Orchestrating Data Assets instead of Tasks | ODSC West, 2022
• Financial Modeling with Apache Spark: Calculating Value at Risk | QCon 2015
• Unsupervised learning on huge data with Apache Spark | MLconf 2014

Pedram Navid

Pedram is the Head of Data Engineering and DevRel at Dagster Labs, previously the Head of Data at Hightouch and has also worked as both a data engineer and a data scientist at small startups and large banks. When he's not causing trouble online, he's out bird-watching.

Topics

• Modern Data Stack analytics
• Buiilding and managing analytics teams
• The current state of open-source data tools
• How developers learn new skills and the impact of social media

Prior appearances

• Data the hard way | What's New In Data
• On data activation and how data gets political. | Infinite Machine Learning
• Pragmatism anbout data stacks. | The Data Stack Show
• How data leaders drive business value. | The Distributed Truth
• Pedram Navid & Taylor Murphy recap data council | The Analytics Engineering Podcast
• Discovering the value of a data team. | What Gets Measured