Migrating data pipelines is hard. Migrating 100 autonomous teams from BigQuery to Databricks while simultaneously switching the underlying tracking datasets under a strict deadline and budget is a logistical nightmare. At Zalando, Eugene Klyuchnikov and Mukrram Ur Rahman had to execute this massive “double migration” – technology + data – without halting the business.

To manage this, Eugene, Mukrram, and their team formed a central “virtual strike team” and made a critical architectural decision: they completely decoupled the technology shift from business data validation. More importantly, they heavily leveraged AI to do the heavy lifting. In doing so, they discovered a provocative truth: in the AI era, specific coding skills are overrated. Generating validation notebooks or rewriting SQL into PySpark is virtually free. The actual bottleneck is not how to write the code, but aligning 100 teams on what exactly they are validating.

In this session, Eugene Klyuchnikov and Mukrram Ur Rahman will walk attendees through their team’s exact blueprint. Attendees will learn:

• How the team separated tech migration from data reconciliation.
• How the team used AI as a “commodity coder” to instantly generate validation notebooks for decentralized teams.
• The framework the virtual team used to align 100 independent domains on a single validation strategy, saving both time and budget.