Wellington Data Eng meetup, December 2025

Hey all, please join us for our next Wellington 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. Thank you Cloud Shuttle for the venue and Catering! 🎉
🏠 Location: Silver Linings room, Two/Fifty Seven
🍕 Catering: Cloud Shuttle 😊
💬 Join our Slack Group here: Data Engineers Slack Channel

Schedule:
- 5.00pm: Doors Open
- 5.30pm: Announcements and Welcome
- 5.40pm: 1st Talk (25 mins + 5 min Q/A)
- 6.10pm: 2nd Talk (25 mins + 5 min Q/A)
- 6.40pm: Networking
- 7.30pm: Doors Close

Speakers:
🎤 Megha Malhotra, Lead Data Engineer, Westpac NZ Ltd
Talk Title: Adventures in Open-source Dependency Land
Talk Summary: In this talk, I will be sharing the candid realities of running a large-scale open source data ecosystem on-premises. Our journey began with the promise of flexibility and cost savings through Hadoop stack which turned into complex web of interdependencies where each upgrade becomes more difficult.
Speaker Bio: Lead Data Engineer with Westpac New Zealand, specialising in building and managing large scale data ecosystems. Passionate about problem-solving and collaborating, and tackling challenges with new technologies.

🎤 Nick Pinfold, Principal Data Engineer, Wellington City Council
Talk Title: Flipping the Data Team
Talk Summary: Using an AI first approach to change the way we work.
The advances in AI now allow us to take business specification and turn these into POC plumbed into the background data. These POC are better for requirements gathering and can flip the data team to start with a solution and work backwards to models.
This helps the data team NOT build product that is not going to be used.
Speaker Bio: With a career spanning over twenty years as a technical lead specializing in database engineering.
I have worked in very wide roles with many technologies in all the roles I have brought a systems engineering (devops/dataops) approach architecting and creating automated systems driven by a metadata/context layer.

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...