DET Seattle Meetup - July 16

The Data Engineer Things (DET) Seattle Meetup focuses on hosting in-person professional networking events for the data engineering community. Join our meetup for talks from industry experts and connect with like-minded data professionals! All experience levels are welcome. Location Downtown Seattle (The building entrance can be found at Olive Way and Terry street) Parking Street parking and the parking lot at the convention center is available. There is also some bike parking at the convention center across the street if needed. Speakers Himanshi Manglunia - From Manual to Magical: Building AI Agents for ETL Automation Abstract: Data engineers spend countless hours on repetitive ETL enhancements — adding columns, updating transformations, fixing schema mismatches. A "simple" pipeline change that should take 90 minutes routinely balloons into a full day of context switching, redeployment cycles, and debugging. What if AI agents could handle these changes end to end? In this talk, we'll walk through the design of a self-healing ETL automation system powered by AI agents. Rather than one-shot code generation, the system executes a full workflow: parsing requirements from natural language, modifying SQL while preserving team coding patterns, deploying to cloud infrastructure, monitoring execution with exponential backoff, and automatically recovering from common failures — all without human intervention. We'll start with the real cost of repetitive pipeline work and what makes a task a good candidate for automation. Then we'll unpack the architecture: how the agent validates schemas via metadata catalogs, deploys and triggers Airflow DAGs, classifies failures as auto-fixable vs. requiring human intervention, and retries up to 3 times before escalating. We'll also cover why the AI model is only a fraction of the solution — the real product is the context layer: guardrails About Himanshi: Himanshi Manglunia is a Data Engineer at Amazon Web Services with nearly a decade of experience building data pipelines across financial services, payments, and cloud technology. At AWS, she works on data engineering and MLOps, designing large-scale data infrastructure that powers critical business decisions. Himanshi is passionate about using AI agents to eliminate repetitive engineering work, and this talk draws from her hands-on experience building autonomous ETL automation systems Chad Sanderson - Future of Data Management using techniques borrowed from security space Abstract: In this session, Chad will discuss the future of data management, and how the most sophisticated companies in the world are applying data lineage and quality before code changes are ever pushed into production using techniques borrowed from the security space in novel applications. About Chad: Chad Sanderson is the author of Data Contracts: Building Production Grade Pipelines at Scale, and the CEO of Gable.ai. Chad has spent the last decade at the frontier of data management, coining the terms data contracts and shift left data with the goal of pushing data quality into the application development developer lifecycle. How to Submit Talks We are always looking for speakers! Submit your talk ideas HERE. Sponsors Astronomer ClickHouse Cheers! The DET Seattle Team ℹ️ About Data Engineer Things Data Engineer Things (DET) is a global community built by data engineers for data engineers. Subscribe to the newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn to gain access to exclusive learning resources and networking opportunities, including articles, webinars, meetups, conferences, mentorship, and more.