Kathryn Smith is the Data Architecture and Engineering Lead at Thrive Learning, where she heads the team behind Thrive’s embedded analytics platform, multi-tenant Snowflake architecture, and the secure semantic layer powering Thrive’s Cortex-based AI features. Over the past year, her team replaced Thrive’s monolithic SQL deployment stack with a clean per-service dbt monorepo using GitHub Actions, improved dashboard performance by up to 65%, and scaled the platform to support 3 million users in production. She has a soft spot for the gnarly problems hiding underneath neat architecture diagrams.