Raj Patel

Nine years building data platforms in adtech, where volume is real and cost is unforgiving. My discipline is sizing the solution to the actual problem — proving you need streaming before you build it, versioning schema contracts, and never letting a change silently break something downstream.

I've consolidated far more duplicate pipelines than I've greenfielded new ones. The instinct I publish is restraint: the cheapest pipeline is the one you didn't need to build, and the most dangerous is the one nobody downstream knew had changed.