Audience research and community maps

Community map Where data engineers hang out online 20+ Slacks, Discords, subreddits, newsletters, podcasts, and conferences. Community map Where ML engineers hang out online MLOps Community, Latent Space, NeurIPS, and ML-specific communities mapped. Community map Where AI engineers hang out online Latent Space Discord, AI Engineer Summit, and LLM-applied communities. Audience Streaming data engineers (Kafka, Flink) ~22% of the DE audience. Senior IC + staff. Kafka Summit, Flink Forward, Stream Processing Summit anchor the calendar. Audience Warehouse practitioners (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks) The dominant DE subpopulation. Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks SQL, Redshift cover most of the market. Audience dbt practitioners and analytics engineers The dbt-native AE subpopulation. ~50K dbt Slack members. Modeling vocabulary fluency required. Audience Lakehouse and Iceberg practitioners Iceberg dominant; Delta and Hudi hold shares. Catalog choice is the central architectural decision. Audience Orchestration users (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, Flyte) Most opinionated audience in DE. Four named tools with distinct design philosophies. Operational pain is the entry point. Audience Data quality and observability users The engineers responsible for catching data issues before someone above them does. Alert signal-to-noise is the central criterion. Audience Data engineering leaders and platform decision-makers The audience that signs the contract. Different content needs and evaluation criteria than the practitioner layer. Audience Data engineers by company stage Practice varies meaningfully across seed, Series A-B, Series C-D, enterprise, and Big Tech. Stage is the largest audience variable.