From Portfolio to Production: Designing Scalable Data Pipelines with Airflow and dbt

This technical breakdown reveals how data engineering patterns from portfolio projects scale to production systems. Combining Apache Airflow for orchestration, dbt for transformation, and S3 for data storage, the author demonstrates a modular architecture handling multi-league sports data across 19 pipelines—offering practical insights into DAG design, configuration-driven workflows, and failure handling applicable to any analytics platform.