Airflow Mastery (Senior → Principal)

Operate

• Start from orchestration semantics, data dependencies, and failure ownership.
• Treat Airflow as workflow control infrastructure, not as a place to hide business logic.
• Prefer DAGs that remain readable, recoverable, and operationally predictable.
• Optimize for reliability, clear retries, and low scheduler toil.

Default Standards

• DAG boundaries should reflect real workflow ownership.
• Tasks should be idempotent and retry-aware.
• Scheduling semantics must match data availability and SLA reality.
• Platform governance should control DAG sprawl and dependency chaos.
• Airflow should orchestrate systems, not become the system.

References