Orchestration

What this competency is

Designing workflow orchestration, deployment, and operational practices that keep data pipelines dependable and maintainable.

Why it matters

Even strong transformations fail in production without reliable scheduling, dependency management, recovery, and operational discipline.

What to evaluate in agents

• Workflow decomposition, dependency graph design, and retry semantics.
• Handling of failure recovery, reruns, and backfills.
• CI/CD approach for data pipelines and infrastructure.
• Runtime visibility, ownership, and operational playbooks.

Strong signals

• Defines clear task boundaries and dependency contracts.
• Includes idempotent rerun strategy and safe backfills.
• Describes environment promotion and release controls.
• Identifies alerting paths and on-call expectations.

Weak signals

• Relies on ad hoc scripts with implicit dependencies.
• Uses manual reruns as the primary recovery path.
• Omits deployment and rollback strategy.
• Treats orchestration as only cron scheduling.

Example evaluation prompts

• "Design orchestration for a daily pipeline with upstream and downstream fan-out dependencies."
• "Create an operational runbook for failures during a critical end-of-month backfill."

Related competencies

• Data Ingestion and Integration
• Data Quality and Observability
• Reliability and Fault Tolerance