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DataAdvancedAutumn 2026

Climate Data Engineering

Hosted by R3i Ventures — Water & Climate

Environmental data is late, sparse and wrong in interesting ways. You will build an ingestion pipeline that survives all three, with tests, lineage and a quality contract — then hand it over to an operator who was not in the room while you built it.

Skills assessed

Pipeline designData quality contractsLineageTestingHandover documentation

The six sprints

Each sprint has one named outcome. Your mentor signs it off, sends it back with written challenges, or fails it — the same three options the permanent team gets.

  1. W1

    Source archaeology

    Outcome — A source profile documenting every way the feed misbehaves.

    14 hrs · 3 tasks

    • Ingest a raw week

      Build

      Land seven days of raw telemetry untouched.

      4 hours

    • Profile the mess

      Research

      Nulls, duplicates, clock skew, unit drift — quantify each.

      5 hours

    • Write the source profile

      Build

      The document the next engineer will thank you for.

      5 hours

  2. W2

    Contract & schema

    Outcome — A published data contract with enforceable expectations.

    14 hrs · 3 tasks

    • Design the target schema

      Build

      Grain, keys, slowly-changing dimensions.

      5 hours

    • Write expectations

      Build

      Encode the contract as executable checks, not prose.

      5 hours

    • Contract review

      Review

      Negotiate the contract with a downstream consumer.

      4 hours

  3. W3

    Pipeline build

    Outcome — An idempotent pipeline that can be re-run without fear.

    14 hrs · 3 tasks

    • Build ingestion

      Build

      Idempotent, replayable, with watermarking.

      6 hours

    • Build transforms

      Build

      Modelled layers with tests at each boundary.

      6 hours

    • Failure drill

      Review

      Break it deliberately; document the recovery path.

      2 hours

  4. W4

    Quality & observability

    Outcome — Alerts that fire on real problems and stay silent otherwise.

    14 hrs · 3 tasks

    • Freshness and volume checks

      Build

      Thresholds justified by the source profile, not guesses.

      5 hours

    • Lineage graph

      Build

      Every column traceable to a source field.

      5 hours

    • Alert tuning

      Review

      Replay two weeks of history; count false positives.

      4 hours

  5. W5

    Consumer delivery

    Outcome — A downstream analyst answers their question without your help.

    14 hrs · 3 tasks

    • Serving layer

      Build

      Publish the marts the consumer actually asked for.

      6 hours

    • Consumer test

      Review

      Give an analyst a question and watch, silently.

      4 hours

    • Fix what you learned

      Build

      Act on the friction you observed, not what you assumed.

      4 hours

  6. W6

    Handover

    Outcome — A cold handover: the operator runs it with you on mute.

    14 hrs · 4 tasks

    • Write the runbook

      Build

      Failure modes, escalation, rollback.

      5 hours

    • Cold handover drill

      Review

      Operator runs an incident with you silent.

      3 hours

    • Architecture review

      Present

      Present the design and its trade-offs to a panel.

      3 hours

    • Case study writeup

      Build

      Publish to your FutureFit skills passport.

      3 hours

Ready to take the track?

Applications close two weeks before the Autumn 2026 cohort starts.

Apply now