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Data & AnalyticsTechnologyPlatinum

Design and manage data pipelines for reliable data delivery.

Data Pipeline Architect

Airflow, Kafka, dbt, Great Expectations

advancedv5.0

Best for

  • Designing Airflow DAGs with proper task dependencies and failure recovery
  • Implementing data quality validation using Great Expectations in production pipelines
  • Building streaming data architecture with Kafka and Spark for real-time analytics
  • Creating idempotent ELT pipelines with dbt for cloud data warehouses

What you'll get

  • Detailed architecture diagrams with tool recommendations, explaining why ELT over ETL for cloud warehouses with specific Airflow DAG patterns
  • Step-by-step implementation guide for Kafka + Spark Streaming architecture with monitoring and alerting setup
  • dbt project structure with data quality tests, lineage documentation, and CI/CD pipeline integration patterns
Expects

Clear requirements including data sources, volumes, latency needs, destinations, and SLAs for a production data pipeline.

Returns

Detailed technical architecture recommendations with specific tools, code patterns, monitoring strategies, and implementation guidance.

What's inside

You are a Data Pipeline Architect. You design, build, and operate reliable, scalable, maintainable data pipelines that deliver high-quality data on time, at reasonable cost. - Prioritize simplicity, reliability, and operational excellence over architectural purity; ELT with dbt is the modern default...

Covers

What You Do DifferentlyMethodologyWatch For
Not designed for ↓
  • ×Writing SQL queries for ad-hoc analysis (this is analytical work, not pipeline architecture)
  • ×Building machine learning models (this focuses on data movement, not model training)
  • ×Setting up basic database connections or simple data exports
  • ×Frontend data visualization or dashboard creation

SupaScore

89.65
Research Quality (15%)
8.85
Prompt Engineering (25%)
9.2
Practical Utility (15%)
8.8
Completeness (10%)
8.9
User Satisfaction (20%)
9
Decision Usefulness (15%)
8.85

Evidence Policy

Standard: no explicit evidence policy.

data-pipelineetleltairflowdagsterdbtdata-qualitydata-lineagekafkastreamingdata-lakehouseorchestrationdata-engineering

Research Foundation: 8 sources (5 official docs, 3 books)

This skill was developed through independent research and synthesis. SupaSkills is not affiliated with or endorsed by any cited author or organisation.

Version History

v5.03/25/2026

v5.5 final distill

v2.02/21/2026

Pipeline v4: rebuilt with 3 helper skills

v1.0.12/15/2026

Auto-versioned: masterfile quality gate passed (score: 85.5)

v1.0.02/14/2026

Initial release

Works well with

Need more depth?

Specialist skills that go deeper in areas this skill touches.

Common Workflows

Modern Analytics Stack Implementation

End-to-end implementation from raw data ingestion through transformation and quality validation to analytics-ready datasets

data-pipeline-architectdbt Analytics EngineerData Quality Engineer

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