Andrew Jones is a Principal Engineer at GoCardless, one of Europe’s leading fintechs, with over 15 years of experience in the industry. The first half of his career was spent primarily as a software engineer before he moved into the data infrastructure and data engineering space, a path that shaped his conviction that data platforms deserve the same engineering discipline as any other production system.

Joining GoCardless as its first data engineer, Andrew led his team in building the company’s data platform from scratch. After initially following a typical data architecture and growing frustrated with facing the same old challenges the industry has battled for years, he started thinking there must be a better way. That search led him to coin and define the ideas around data contracts, an approach that has since spread across the data engineering community and changed how teams think about data quality and ownership at the boundaries between systems.

Andrew is a regular speaker and writer, sharing hard-earned lessons on data platform design, data engineering leadership, and organizational adoption. Above all, he is passionate about helping organizations get the most value from their data.