The Platform Team Said No — dbt won with “Yes” - Story of Governance, Autonomy, and Scale

At Delivery Hero, one of the world's largest food delivery platforms, we run a decentralised data engineering org — 50+ teams, 70+ countries, 60+ PB data, 300k+ tables. Teams run pipelines autonomously, and domain engineers want to create data products rapidly to enable data driven business decisions. This is a complex setup, initially all without dbt!

This won’t be a talk, but rather a live dialogue between two practitioners from opposite sides of that negotiation to bring dbt into Delivery Hero. One sat on the "central data platform team", responsible for standardisation, quality and governance. The other sat in a "domain team" owning their pipelines. We'll recreate the real friction — the "you can't do that" moments — and show how dbt gave both sides a shared language to work with.

We'll cover how dbt enabled the platform team to empower domain teams: dbt's ease of use, small effort to migrate, and the suite of features like lineage and tests. We'll also talk about what's next for our teams, the features we're still exploring, and what we haven't solved yet.