Real-Time Data Platform: Kafka, Druid & Airbyte Infrastructure for Business Intelligence at Scale

A growing SaaS company needed real-time analytics on top of high-volume event data, with self-serve dashboards for nontechnical stakeholders - without building a data team from scratch.

I built and ran the infrastructure for their full data stack: Kafka for event streaming, Apache Druid as the real-time OLAP database for sub-second query performance over large datasets, Airbyte for data integration from external sources, and Apache Superset for BI dashboards the business team could use directly.

Everything ran on hardened, bastion-gated AWS infrastructure - with no direct public access to any data service and jump-host access patterns for all operational work.

Result: a production data platform capable of ingesting and querying high-volume event streams in near real-time, with a self-serve BI layer that didn't require an analyst to write a query for every business question.