The Data Engineering Show - Podcast

How AI Is Reshaping Modern Data Teams and the Future of Platforms with Xavier Gumara Rigol

1.3K views · 2mo ago · 19:51

Guest: Xavier Gumara Rigol

In this episode of the Data Engineering Show, host Benjamin sits down with Xavier Gumara Rigol, Head of Data at Manychat, to discuss how artificial intelligence is fundamentally transforming data roles, organizational structures, and the future of analytics platforms while creating new types of work rather than eliminating existing ones.

Topics: Meet Xavier: Head of Data at Manychat · How AI is Transforming Data Team Roles · Reorganizing Data Teams Around Cross-Functional Problems · Manychat's Data Stack: Snowflake, Tableau & Beyond · Natural Language to SQL: The Future of Analytics · Build vs. Buy: Evaluating AI Analytics Tools in 2026

Building Modern Data Platforms Without Legacy Bottlenecks ft Andrew Jones

13K views · 2mo ago · 22:55

Guest: Andrew Jones

In this episode of The Data Engineering Show, host Benjamin Wagner sits down with Andrew Jones, Staff Data Engineer at LocalStack, to explore how data teams can transition from centralized, bottlenecked operations to scalable, self-serve platforms - while managing real-time reliability demands that now define modern data infrastructure.

Topics: Meet Andrew Jones: Building Data Platforms at LocalStack · What LocalStack Does: AWS and Snowflake Emulators · From Centralized Data Teams to Self-Service Platforms · LocalStack's Data Stack: Snowflake, Tinybird, and Real-Time Analytics · Designing for Different User Personas: Engineers vs. Business Stakeholders · The Challenge: Building New Platforms While Supporting Legacy Systems

Why 99% of BI Tools Get Embedded Analytics Wrong And How Omni Fixed It ft. Chris Merrick

91K views · 3mo ago · 24:43

Guest: Chris Merrick

In this episode of The Data Engineering Show, host Benjamin sits down with Chris Merrick, CTO and cofounder of Omni, to explore how AI is transforming the analytics stack—and why keeping humans at the center of that transformation is critical to avoiding becoming just another middleware layer.

Topics: Why Humans Still Matter in AI · Build AI Agents for Your Domain · Guardrails Make AI Analytics Better · Semantic Curation Beats Bigger AI Models · Why SQL Still Powers Better AI · AI Feedback Loops Drive Continuous Learning

AI for Data and Data for AI: The Dual Frontier of Modern Data Engineering ft. Pranav Motarwar

32K views · 4mo ago · 23:10

Guest: Pranav Motarwar

In this episode of The Data Engineering Show, host Benjamin sits down with Pranav Motarwar, a data engineer who has worked across major tech companies and the intersection of AI and data infrastructure, to explore how artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping the data engineering landscape - not by eliminating roles, but by bifurcating the field into two distinct, equally critical domains.

Topics: Data Engineering Evolution: Pre-LLM to AI-Driven Pipelines · The Bifurcation of Data Engineering: Human vs. AI Consumers · Why Traditional Tools Like DBT Remain Essential in 2026 · Breaking Down Engineer-Product Manager Boundaries · Single Engineers Own End-to-End Pipelines That Required 7-8 People · Why Agent Pipelines Require Completely Different Architecture

AI Won't Replace Engineers, But This Framework Will Change How They Build with Rohit Girme

596 views · 6mo ago · 19:41

Guest: Rohit Girme

Topics: Building a Gen AI Evaluation Platform at Airbnb · From Customer Support Bot to Evaluation in Action · Why Monolithic Prompts Fail: The Case for Specialized Judges · Real-Time vs. Offline Evaluation: A Dual Approach · Using AI as a Tool, Not a Replacement: The Human Orchestrator · Measuring Real Productivity Beyond Token Consumption

The Framework Canva Uses for 200M+ Designers with Paul Tune

976 views · 6mo ago · 27:07

Guest: Paul Tune

In this episode of The Data Engineering Show, host Benjamin sits down with Paul, Staff Research Scientist at Canva, to explore how the design platform is building agentic workflows, managing multimodal data pipelines, and tackling the unique challenge of teaching machines to understand aesthetic taste alongside functional design.

Topics: What Canva Does and Paul's Role as Staff Research Scientist · Canva's Diverse Audience: From Students to Enterprise · Agentic Workflows and the Challenge of Aesthetic Matching · Intent Matching: Designing for Beginners vs. Expert Users · Tech Stack Deep Dive: Snowflake, Kinesis, and S3 · Distributed Training with Ray on Kubernetes