The complete modern data stack in 5 days. ETL pipelines, data warehouses, dbt transforms, PySpark batch jobs, and Airflow orchestration — built by engineers who run these systems in production.
This is a text-first course that links out to the best supporting material on the internet instead of trying to replace it. The goal is to make this the best course on data engineering and pipeline architecture you can find — even without producing a single minute of custom video.
This course is built by people who ship production data systems for a living. It reflects how things actually work on real projects — not how the documentation describes them.
Every day has working code snippets you can paste into your editor and run right now. The emphasis is on understanding what each line does, not memorizing syntax.
Instead of shooting videos that go stale in six months, Precision AI Academy links to the definitive open-source implementations, official documentation, and the best conference talks on the topic.
Each day is designed to finish in about an hour of focused reading plus hands-on work. You can do the whole course over a week of lunch breaks. No calendar commitment, no live classes, no quizzes.
Each day stands alone. Read them in order for the full picture, or jump straight to the day that answers the question you have today.
The fundamental pattern behind every data pipeline. How to extract from APIs, databases, and flat files; transform with Python; and load into a warehouse without blowing up on schema changes.
Why Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift think differently than PostgreSQL. Star schemas, columnar storage, and the SQL patterns that make warehouse queries fast.
dbt turns raw warehouse tables into clean analytics-ready models. Models, tests, documentation, and the incremental materializations that save you money on compute.
When your data is too big for pandas. RDDs vs DataFrames, transformations vs actions, partitioning strategy, and how to run Spark on a cluster without a PhD.
Scheduling and monitoring your pipelines with Apache Airflow. DAGs, operators, XComs, retries, and the alerting setup that keeps you from missing a broken pipeline at 3am.
Instead of shooting our own videos, Precision AI Academy links to the best deep-dives already on YouTube. Watch them alongside the course. All external, all free, all from builders who ship this stuff.
Walkthroughs of how dbt, Airflow, Snowflake, and Fivetran fit together in a real data engineering workflow.
Setting up DAGs, operators, and task dependencies. The best practical walkthroughs of Airflow for data engineers.
Building, testing, and documenting dbt models. Covers incremental models, macros, and the dbt test framework.
From RDDs to DataFrames to running Spark jobs on a real cluster. Covers partitioning and the shuffle problem.
The best way to understand any technology is to read the production-grade implementations that prove it works. These repositories implement patterns from every day of this course.
The industry-standard pipeline orchestrator. Study the source to understand how DAG parsing, task queuing, and retries actually work.
The open-source transformation tool this course covers on Day 3. Read the adapters to understand how dbt compiles SQL for different warehouses.
The distributed compute engine behind PySpark. The Python API source shows exactly what happens when you call .groupBy() on a DataFrame.
Open-source EL(T) platform with 300+ connectors. The best reference implementation for how production data extraction actually works.
You know how to build APIs and services. This course teaches the data-specific patterns — schemas, warehouses, and orchestration — that are different from web engineering.
You write SQL and know your data. This course teaches you to build the pipelines that feed the tables you query every day.
Your models are only as good as your pipeline. This course teaches you to fix the upstream problems instead of working around them.
The 2-day in-person Precision AI Academy bootcamp covers data engineering and pipeline architecture hands-on. 5 U.S. cities. $1,490. 40 seats max. June–October 2026 (Thu–Fri).
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