The Data Engineering Show

What if AI could transform how your entire data team works—without replacing them? In this episode, Benjamin Wagner explores with Xavier Gumara Rigol, Head of Data at Manychat, how natural language-to-SQL tools are reshaping data analyst and data scientist roles, why building a strong data platform is essential for AI-powered self-serve analytics, and the critical strategies for evaluating text-to-insight solutions in 2026. Whether you're leading a data organization or building your next analytics capability, discover how to balance build versus buy decisions and position your team for the AI-driven future of data engineering.

What if you could transform your data team from a bottleneck into a self-serve platform that empowers the entire organization? In this episode, host Benjamin Wagner sits down with Andrew Jones, Staff Data Engineer at LocalStack, to explore how to balance building new data infrastructure while supporting legacy systems, why reliability and data contracts are becoming non-negotiable, and how AI agents are accelerating platform development. Whether you're scaling a data organization or rethinking your data governance strategy, this conversation is packed with practical insights on managing different user personas, automating support requests, and staying open-minded as the data landscape evolves. Tune in to discover how to build resilient, self-serve data platforms that drive real business impact.

What if the future of analytics wasn't about building another middleware layer, but about getting closer to the actual business user? In this episode, Benjamin sits down with Chris Merrick, CTO and cofounder of Omni, to explore why semantic layers matter more than ever in an agentic world, how AI is reshaping embedded analytics and customer-facing data experiences, and the key strategies for keeping complex data models aligned across federated sources. Whether you're building analytics platforms, managing data infrastructure, or trying to make AI work at scale, this conversation is packed with practical insights on balancing governed analytics with exploratory AI, unifying disparate data sources, and capturing business intelligence beyond just the metrics in your warehouse. Tune in to discover how the next generation of analytics platforms will need to think about the entire business, not just the data.

What if the data engineering skills you have today become obsolete in five years? In this episode, host Benjamin Wagner sits down with Pranav Motarwar, a data engineer who's witnessed the industry's transformation from traditional ETL to AI-powered pipelines, to explore how AI is fundamentally reshaping data engineering roles, why you need to master both "AI for data" and "data for AI" to stay relevant, and the emerging infrastructure required to handle multimodal data at scale. Whether you're a data engineer wondering about your career longevity or a builder curious about next-gen data stacks, this conversation unpacks the skills you'll need, the tools defining 2026, and why data engineers aren't disappearing - they're just evolving faster than ever.

What if you could build AI features with confidence while moving at the pace of innovation? In this episode, Benjamin Wagner sits down with Rohit Girma, Staff Software Engineer at Airbnb, to explore how to evaluate generative AI in production, why breaking down complex problems into smaller chunks accelerates development, and the key strategies for scaling AI-powered products beyond zero-to-one. Whether you're shipping AI features or transforming your engineering workflow, this conversation offers practical insights on building reliable AI systems, leveraging LLMs as orchestration tools, and the future of software development. Tune in to discover why humans remain essential in the scaling phase and how your team can move faster without sacrificing quality.