The Meta Layer

Concepts: paDagOrchestration, paMonitoring, paDataQuality

Orchestration, data quality, and monitoring are the meta layer - the infrastructure that makes a pipeline a pipeline instead of a script. Candidates who skip this layer cap themselves at 'hire.' Candidates who treat it as first-class get 'strong hire.' The meta layer is where you prove you've operated pipelines in production, not just built them. Orchestration: DAGs, Not Scripts A production pipeline isn't a Python script that runs on a cron job. It's a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of tasks with dependencies, retries, and alerting. Say 'Airflow' or 'Dagster' - the specific tool matters less than demonstrating you understand task dependencies. If the ingestion task fails, the transformation task shouldn't run. If the transformation task fails, the quality checks should still execute to