Introducing Cohort 3 of the Astronomer Champions Program for Apache Airflow®!

Raviteja is a GCP Certified Professional Architect and developer who builds scalable software systems using microservices. He leverages Apache Airflow® to orchestrate identity resolution processes, transforming customer data into a unified view for various applications. His expertise in Airflow features like DAGs, Operators, XComs, Connections, Variables, and Helm charts ensures optimized functionality and smooth deployments for clients.

With over four years of Airflow experience, Raviteja also supports other teams by troubleshooting issues and proposing workflow enhancements, fostering a collaborative and efficient environment.

Samyak Jain, a seasoned Data Engineer, embarked on his remarkable Airflow journey in 2020 while working on a robust data platform for multinational pharma clients. He swiftly recognized the unparalleled potential of Apache Airflow®, seamlessly blending Python and SQL to streamline data workflows. He has been managing and expanding a data platform that processes billions of daily events from multiple data sources and developing self-service systems that utilize dynamic DAG generation tailored to specific use cases.

Samyak actively contributes to the data community through insightful blog posts and tech conferences.

Mihir works at Etraveli Group as a Senior Data Analyst and has been using Apache Airflow® since 2021. He single-handedly designed and implemented the Airflow architecture for the Finance Automation team at Etraveli Group. Mihir is passionate about sharing the knowledge he has gained over the past three years. To support and build the community, he started writing blogs about Apache Airflow® on Medium.

In addition to his writing, Mihir actively promotes and influences the adoption of Airflow within his network and organization. His contributions have been instrumental in automating numerous daily repetitive tasks and extractions using Dynamic DAGs and Sensors, resulting in significant cost savings for his organization.

Sumit is a Solutions Architect at Mangtas with a passion for data. He began his career in data engineering in 2015, focusing on ETL processes across various technologies. In early 2021, during the pandemic, he discovered Apache Airflow® and developed a keen interest in it. Sumit is enthusiastic about solving diverse industry problems and has experience in sectors such as banking, automotive, telecom, and hospitality.

Priyansh is a Lead Data Science Engineer at Gartner. He uses Apache Airflow® to orchestrate most of their ETL processes, improving the scheduling logic and reliability of DAGs. He leverages Airflow features like TaskFlow, XComs, and dynamic DAG generation to make DAGs simpler and more extensible.

Loo works as a data engineer consultant and started using Airflow (Cloud Composer) in 2022. The client project uses Airflow to orchestrate its ETL processes, leveraging improved scheduling logic and extensibility features like TaskFlow and dynamic DAG generation to facilitate integration with other GCP services. Loo also holds both Astronomer certifications: Apache Airflow® Fundamental and Apache Airflow® DAG Authoring.

Arjun works as a Data Engineer at Telia, where they have been using Airflow (MWAA) since 2023. Previously, he transformed Airflow into an all-in-one workflow orchestrator at Ørsted. Telia uses Airflow to orchestrate their DBT models, with several new use cases lined up. Arjun has improved the templating of DAGs and leveraged Airflow features like TaskFlow, XComs, and data-aware scheduling. He is currently focused on scaling the systems and onboarding the machine learning teams to the platform so they can run their data flows.

In his spare time, Arjun helps fellow members of the Airflow community by answering questions on the Airflow Slack channel. He has also contributed a few changes to the platform and will continue to do so whenever possible.

Kewal has been leveraging Apache Airflow® since 2019. He has improved the scheduling logic and reliability of DAGs and utilized Airflow features like TaskFlow, XComs, KubernetesPodOperator, and dynamic DAG generation to make DAGs simpler and more extensible.

With around five years of experience in Apache Airflow®, Kewal generously guides other teams within the organization by troubleshooting Airflow issues and proposing workflow enhancements, fostering a collaborative and efficient environment. He has helped team members use Airflow efficiently by creating many custom operators. Kewal holds the Astronomer Apache Airflow® Fundamentals Certification.

Snir works as a Senior Data Engineer at Next Insurance. He started using Airflow back in 2018 and holds a special affinity for it, acting as an advocate and ambassador for it in every organization he joins.

Among other things, Snir likes to learn and promote the usage of new features in Airflow within the teams. These features include XComs, Dynamic Task Mapping, DAG Templates, and he even created an in-house linter for writing Airflow DAGs according to Next’s standards.

Nelson Alfonso is an experienced Chartered IT Professional and AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Developer, and SysOps specialist with a strong background in healthcare, IoT, and cloud computing. As the Lead Software Architect at Circadia Health, he leverages his Astronomer Certification for Apache Airflow® Fundamentals to optimize ETL processes and improve system efficiency.

Nelson enhances scheduling logic and DAG reliability using advanced Airflow features, achieving a 25% boost in system efficiency and maintaining 99.99% uptime. He actively contributes to the Airflow community through internal discussions and knowledge sharing, driving significant improvements in deployment efficiency and system performance.

Prakhar works as a Data Engineer at EyeVi Technologies, where he transforms road data processing with Airflow. Since 2018, he has been working with Airflow, utilizing its advanced scheduling, task automation, and data pipeline orchestration capabilities.

His weekends often end with a git push to his data engineering project repositories, where he tries new tools or improves his past approaches to solving data puzzles. He also loves sharing his expertise on the Reddit Airflow community.

Guilherme works as a data engineer at OTO and started using Airflow there in 2022. He participated in the development of DAGs using several custom operators and plugins developed internally. Since then, he has been studying and improving his daily use of the tool, developing CI/CD pipelines with GitLab for DAG repositories, collaborating on articles on Medium, and contributing directly to the official Airflow repository, such as the Discord Notification feature..

Volker is a Data Engineering expert who has been an integral part of the data team at InnoGames in Hamburg, Germany, for over a decade. His responsibilities include managing and expanding the data platform, which processes billions of daily events and has been orchestrated using Airflow since 2020. Volker brings Big Data to life by combining Data Engineering with communication, knowledge sharing, and presentation skills.

His exceptional passion for data has inspired others interested in the field, leading to valuable data solutions. He regularly shares his experiences at conferences as a speaker, publishes Airflow-related articles on Medium, and is always happy to hop on a call or Slack chat to answer questions and discuss ideas.

Yiming has played a variety of roles as a data engineer, data architect, and software engineer with extensive experience across various New Zealand organizations in both the private and public sectors, including Chorus Ltd, IHC Groups Ltd, and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. Since 2018, he has been leveraging Apache Airflow® to orchestrate over 60 ETL pipelines, utilizing features like TaskFlow, XComs, and Dynamic Tasks to handle TB-scale data.

Yiming has been actively promoting and implementing Airflow to enhance DataOps platforms for these different organizations. In his spare time, he has obtained certifications in both Apache Airflow® Fundamentals and Apache Airflow® Fundamentals DAG Authoring.

Ayoade has extensive experience with data orchestration tools like Airflow, which he started using in 2021. At Analytical Minded, where he has been a data consultant since January 2019, he improved processes to reduce bottlenecks by 15% and optimized data scheduling by 30%. His expertise in Airflow includes improving scheduling logic, enhancing DAG reliability, and utilizing features such as TaskFlow, XComs, and dynamic DAG generation to simplify and extend workflows.

Ayoade also regularly shares his experiences at events as a speaker, publishes Airflow-related articles on Medium, and holds both the Astronomer certifications, Apache Airflow® Fundamental, and Apache Airflow® DAG Authoring.

Supriya works as a Manager at Blue Altair. She is a seasoned multi-cloud data engineer and developer. With over 4+ years of experience in Apache Airflow®, Supriya has led, designed, developed, automated, and orchestrated numerous complex data pipelines using a wide range of Airflow features such as operators, hooks, connections, inter-DAG dependencies, and others. She has integrated Airflow with multiple databases, data warehouses, and cloud services. She has also migrated between different versions of Google Cloud Composer (Airflow versions) along with implementing alerting, logging, and monitoring.

Additionally, she has completed the 'Astronomer Certification for Apache Airflow® Fundamentals'. Supriya has a strong track record of mentoring and guiding team members to resolve technical issues effectively.

Alejandro works as a data engineer at EPAM Systems. He has been working with different cloud technologies (AWS, Azure) and languages to create ETLs or ELTs. Apache Airflow® has been an ally since 2021 in building complex data pipelines using features like operators, hooks, sensors, connections, and other useful characteristics like Dynamic Task Mapping. He has created different complex data flows to help build models using technologies like Snowflake, dbt, and AWS services, orchestrating everything with Apache Airflow® (Amazon MWAA).

Furthermore, he passed the two main certifications provided by Astronomer: 'Apache Airflow® DAG Authoring' and 'Astronomer Certification for Apache Airflow® Fundamentals'. He likes to contribute to colleagues by resolving questions or mentoring data engineering topics.

Kristina works as a Data Engineer at Quantori. During her work, she helps Life Science companies build data warehouses in AWS infrastructure to store research data. These are orchestrated by Airflow ETL pipelines to transfer this data to the right place, and Django applications are used to view and work with this data conveniently.

Despite working with Airflow on a project, Kristina has also passed an Astronomer Apache Airflow® Fundamentals Certification and lectured on Airflow at the Data Engineering School at Quantori. Currently, she continues learning from books, blog posts, and Astronomer courses.

Rahul works as a Senior Data Engineer at Rackspace Technology. He has been using Airflow (Cloud Composer) since 2020 for various clients (Telecom, Banking, Retail, etc.) to orchestrate data pipelines and for various POCs, presales demos, etc. He holds the Astronomer Apache Airflow® Fundamentals Certification and has also guided various project teams on its usage and troubleshooting the various issues they have faced.

In addition to this, he has promoted Airflow as an orchestration tool primarily by highlighting its features such as dynamic DAGs, sensors, TaskFlow API, inter-DAG dependency, etc., to new clients who have been using older tools for orchestration and scheduling.

Abhishek Sharma is a Lead Engineer specializing in Engineering DevOps at Airtel X Labs, where he has been instrumental in driving the success of the operations since joining the team. With a strong background in software engineering and a passion for innovative solutions, he has been working extensively with Apache Airflow® since 2020.

At Airtel X Labs, Abhishek plays a crucial role in helping Airtel run Airflow at scale, ensuring that their data pipelines are efficient, reliable, and scalable. His expertise in Airflow has enabled the team to automate complex workflows, manage dependencies seamlessly, and optimize data processing capabilities.

Siddhartha Kumar, a Senior Software Engineer-Big Data at Tiger Analytics in India, has been utilizing Airflow since 2022 to orchestrate complex ETL workflows. By leveraging advanced Airflow features like TaskFlow APIs, XComArgs, Decorators, various Operators, and dynamic DAG creation, he has significantly improved pipeline reliability and extensibility.

Passionate about innovation and community, Siddhartha contributes to the Airflow ecosystem by helping peers while on work and on platforms like LinkedIn, aiming to enhance the community’s proficiency with Airflow.

Wael BEN MSAAD is a dedicated DataOps/Data Engineer working on building the Cloud Data Platform for one of the largest retailers in the world. With a strong background in DataOps and CloudOps, Wael plays a crucial role in the development, debugging, and monitoring of Airflow DAGs, ensuring seamless data operations across the organization.

His journey in the data domain has seen him work on various data-related positions, where he has honed his skills in infrastructure, governance, and platform architecture. His current focus is on creating and troubleshooting multiple DAGs parts of the Data platform, enabling other teams to leverage the full potential of the cloud environment.

Nishchay Agrawal is an Airflow Certified professional with Airflow Fundamentals and Apache Airflow® DAG Authoring certifications. He leverages Apache Airflow® to orchestrate identity resolution processes. His expertise in Airflow features like DAGs, Operators, XComs, Connections, Variables, and Helm charts ensures optimized functionality and smooth deployments.

Nishchay’s collaborative approach has been key in elevating data engineering practices and driving successful data-driven initiatives.