Auckland Data Eng meetup, August 2026

Hey all, please join us for our August Auckland Data Eng meetup. Join us for an engaging session filled with exciting discussions and networking opportunities.

Don't miss out—RSVP to secure your spot. Venue and catering details coming soon — we'll update this page as soon as they're confirmed! 🎉

🏠 Location: TBC
🍕 Catering: TBC
💬 Join our Slack Group here: Data Engineers Slack Channel
Schedule:

• 5.00pm: Doors Open
• 5.20pm: Announcements and Welcome
• 5.30pm: 1st Talk (25 mins + 5 min Q/A)
• 6.00pm: 2nd Talk (25 mins + 5 min Q/A)
• 6.30pm: 3rd Talk (25 mins + 5 min Q/A)
• 7.00pm: Networking
• 8.00pm: Doors Close

Speakers:
🎤 Emily Melhuish, Data Engineer, Independent
Talk Title: Fire and Ice: Building a data platform to power solar operations
Talk Summary: Solar farms are part of the answer to a renewable energy future. These massive solar arrays take power from the sun and safely deliver it to the grid to then be used by us, the consumer. Efficiency gains of even 1% can make a big difference in the feasibility of solar, so having rock solid analytics at scale is a necessity. More and more farms are being built and therefore the cost to get said analytics is also important.
Join Emily as she walks through the constraints of the solar industry and how she built a data platform for solar farms on a budget using almost entirely open-source tools. In some parts real-time matters, in others, a one hour lag is acceptable - how can we use the best of both batch and streaming worlds to keep pipelines performant but also cheap? She'll focus on Apache Iceberg, an open table format, as well as touch on Victoria Metrics and DuckDB.
Speaker Bio: Emily loves to be involved in a range of things from blowing up circuits to riding horses to rockets. She's an Electrical Engineer by trade but has found herself working in the realms of software and data science. With a passion for both hardware and software, she hopes to combine the two to make technology smarter and more sustainable. Currently, she is helping various kiwi startups build beautiful yet affordable data platforms.

🎤 Chuan-Zheng Lee, Technical Data Consultant, Kami
Talk Title: Are these the same customer? I gave up and built an AI agent instead
Talk Summary: For years, we struggled to populate a new source of truth for customer identity while maintaining data quality. Decisions about entity resolution required judgement that was too fuzzy to automate, yet too tedious to throw humans at tens of thousands of cases — including schools and school districts from all over the United States. The advent of agentic AI promised a new approach. This talk will explore our journey and lessons learnt in building an AI agent to tackle the surprisingly hairy problem of organisational identity. We'll cover early naive approaches, hallucinations of federal records, agents not obeying instructions, security guardrails, human-in-the-loop features, and how the 7,000-word prompt helped document tacit institutional knowledge. The agent reduced processing time from around 10–30 minutes per case to about 1–3 minutes, showing how elements of agentic AI can help solve previously intractable problems.
Speaker Bio: After three years as Kami's first Head of Data, leading a team of data engineers, data analysts and internal tools engineers, Chuan-Zheng has stepped back and is now completing this final project there. Prior to joining Kami, he completed his PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford, studying information theory and machine learning.

🎤 Steven MacLeod, Founder, Occam Software Ltd
Talk Title: Entering the new world of data
Talk Summary: This talk will be a demonstration of the Occam Data Platform. We are starting to talk to companies in the US and Europe. The reason for the talk is for the audience to play a critical role of assessing the platform, and asking the hard questions. We want to stress test the demo. The benefit for the audience is that they will see one future direction of data in the emerging world of AI, and have the opportunity to critique the direction as well as relate it to the work they may be doing.
Speaker Bio: Steven has spent 25 years researching why information systems fail, including time delays and cost overruns. The Occam data platform is the outcome of that research.

If you'd like to present at future meetups, please submit your talk here!

Remember to bring along some great questions! See you all there...