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Data Engineering
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Orbital Data Contracts
A data contract framework that cut incidents 60%.
Client
Orbital Software
Delivered
2024 · 4 months
Team
5 engineers
Category
Data Engineering
Overview
What we built
Introduced producer-owned data contracts, schema evolution rules and automated CI checks across Orbital's platform teams.
Business impact
Outcomes that moved the P&L
0%
Data incidents
0%
Firefighting time
0+
Contracts live
0
Teams onboarded
The challenge
- Every silent schema change caused downstream pipeline breakage.
- Data platform team spent 40% of the sprint firefighting.
- Product engineers felt data quality was 'somebody else's problem'.
How we approached it
- Defined contract standards, CI gates, and a shared registry.
- Rolled out with two pilot teams and expanded org-wide over a quarter.
- Instrumented contract violations as first-class engineering incidents.
What changed
- Data incidents down 60% within the first two quarters.
- Platform team capacity for new work up 34%.
- Product engineers now own their data outputs end-to-end.
Project gallery
Inside the delivery
Contract registry
Producer-owned, versioned, discoverable.
CI enforcement
Every breaking change caught pre-merge.
Ownership dashboard
Data quality as an engineering metric.
Technology
Built with
The tools and platforms we chose for this engagement.
dbt
Great Expectations
GitHub Actions
Datadog
Snowflake
More work
Related projects
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