Home Podcasts The Data Flowcast: Mastering Apache Airflow ® for Data Engineering and AI
The Data Flowcast: Mastering Apache Airflow ® for Data Engineering and AI

The Data Flowcast: Mastering Apache Airflow ® for Data Engineering and AI

Astronomer 104 Episodes Aug 20, 2026

The Data Flowcast is a podcast dedicated to Apache Airflow, a workflow management system for data engineering and AI. Each week, the show explores the current state, future, and potential of Airflow with leading thinkers in the community. It provides insights on how to leverage Airflow to meet the evolving needs of data engineering and AI ecosystems. The podcast is produced by Astronomer, a company specializing in Airflow solutions.

Episodes

Managing travel platform data with Airflow at Headout
Managing travel platform data with Airflow at Headout Aug 20, 2026 28:48 Running a travel platform means dealing with fast-moving inventory, real-time fraud detection, and heavy performance marketing attribution, all while keeping data trustworthy for a data-driven org. In this episode, Mrinalini Singh, Data Platform Engineer at [Headout](headout.com), walks through how her team uses Airflow as the nervous system of their stack: orchestrating dbt with a write-audit-pub
How Airflow orchestration decisions impact Spark performance
How Airflow orchestration decisions impact Spark performance Aug 13, 2026 19:02 Airflow and Spark are one of the most common combinations in modern data platforms, but the orchestration decisions made on the Airflow side often determine whether Spark jobs run fast and cheap or slow and expensive. In this episode, Kenten is joined by [Meni Shmueli](linkedin.com/in/meni-shmueli-dataflint), Co-Founder and CEO at [DataFlint](dataflint.io), to dig into how Airflow and Spark fit to
Using Airflow for diverse client projects at Accion Labs
Using Airflow for diverse client projects at Accion Labs Aug 6, 2026 27:36 When a real-time loan eligibility scoring pipeline is built on cron jobs, midnight pages are inevitable. In this episode, [Chandan Gowda](linkedin.com/in/chandan-gowda-a-h-744908195), Data Engineer at [Accion Labs](accionlabs.com), joins Kenten to discuss how his team uses Airflow across client projects, including a financial services scoring use case and a POC applying production-grade orchestrat
Consolidating legacy job schedulers with Airflow at Trading Technologies
Consolidating legacy job schedulers with Airflow at Trading Technologies Jul 30, 2026 31:27 Migrating two decades of legacy job orchestration is the kind of project most teams quietly avoid. In this episode, Marc Lamberti is joined by [Sanket Patel](linkedin.com/in/sanket-patel-a2a57b3a), Director of Engineering at Trading Technologies, to talk through how his team is consolidating 20 years of C#/.NET-based scheduling and a recently acquired company's stack onto Airflow, Astronomer, and
Orchestrating AI video intelligence and evaluation pipelines at Firework
Orchestrating AI video intelligence and evaluation pipelines at Firework Jul 23, 2026 22:31 How do you orchestrate AI workflows when LLM outputs are non-deterministic and evaluation costs can quietly exceed compute costs? Shawn Feng, Head of Data at [Firework](firework.com), joins the show to walk through how his team uses Airflow to coordinate ingestion, embeddings, and evaluation pipelines for AI features in a video commerce platform. The conversation covers the technical stack, the ch
Orchestrating Retail Data Pipelines at Saks Global
Orchestrating Retail Data Pipelines at Saks Global Jul 16, 2026 25:20 Saks Global runs one of the largest retail data operations in the US, with around 8 million SKUs flowing across point-of-sale, e-commerce, catalog, and fraud detection systems into Snowflake. In this episode, [Shailesh Kadam](linkedin.com), Architect at [Saks Global](saks.com), joins Kenten to walk through how Airflow acts as the nervous system tying it all together, why they moved from self-manag
What's New in Apache Airflow® 3.3
What's New in Apache Airflow® 3.3 Jul 9, 2026 27:27 Airflow 3.3 is here, with a set of features to help with the messy realities of production pipelines: persisting state across retries, reacting intelligently to different failure types, and partitioning assets by more than just time. In this episode, Marc Lamberti, Education Content Lead at [Astronomer](astronomer.io), joins Kenten Danas to walk through what's new in the release and where each fea
Running Airflow 3 in a regulated environment at OTPP
Running Airflow 3 in a regulated environment at OTPP Jun 25, 2026 18:49 Running Apache Airflow at a major pension fund means balancing strict compliance requirements with the need to move fast on new capabilities. On this episode, Kowsy Narayan, Cloud Data Platform Lead, Data Engineering at [Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan](otpp.com), joins host Kenten Danas to walk through OTPP's cloud migration, their move to Airflow 3, and going fully live on remote execution.Key Ta
Managing a Customer Analytics Platform with Airflow at Skimlinks
Managing a Customer Analytics Platform with Airflow at Skimlinks Jun 11, 2026 22:40 Skimlinks runs a reporting platform that serves around 2,000 weekly publisher users, and the data infrastructure behind it runs on Airflow. In this episode, Julian Larralde, Director of Data Engineering at Skimlinks, walks through the stack, the migration from external task sensors to event-driven Assets, and a YAML-based DAG factory the team built to onboard new publishers without rewriting Pytho
Building a custom Tableau provider for Airflow at JLR
Building a custom Tableau provider for Airflow at JLR Jun 4, 2026 21:18 JLR is the UK's largest automotive manufacturer, behind brands like Range Rover, Jaguar, Defender, and Discovery. In this episode, Najeeb Sulaiman, Senior Data Engineer at JLR, walks through how Airflow orchestrates data across manufacturing, supply chain, and finance — including a custom Tableau provider his team built (after the community version dropped PAT authentication) and a CI/CD pipeline
Orchestrating 2,000 Airflow pipelines at Luiza Labs with Mateus Ferreira
Orchestrating 2,000 Airflow pipelines at Luiza Labs with Mateus Ferreira May 28, 2026 32:37 Running Airflow at the scale of a national retailer means more than just scheduling. It means giving non-engineers a path to ship DAGs, and classifying thousands of runs to know which ones need attention. In this episode, Mateus Ferreira, Senior Data Engineer at Luiza Labs (the technology arm of Magazine Luiza, one of Brazil's largest retailers), joins Marc to talk about the patterns his team uses
Enhancing DAGs for Data Processing  with William Orgertrice III at Cargill
Enhancing DAGs for Data Processing with William Orgertrice III at Cargill May 21, 2026 26:15 In the data engineering world, the difference between a pipeline that works and one that's truly production-ready often comes down to a handful of deliberate decisions. William Orgertrice III, Data Engineer at Cargill, joins us to share the DAG design and monitoring practices he presented at Airflow Summit 2025 and how his team is rolling out Airflow across 60+ internal teams as part of Cargill's

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