Aura Talks: Engineering Data Products for End Users

The rise of AI is driving companies to invest more in data as a product as opposed to data as part of the product.  Across the industry (from capital markets to energy tech to wearable devices) companies are building products where data is the key part of the user experience.
This shift is changing what great data engineering looks like. It’s no longer just about pipelines and infrastructure, but about designing data with the end user in mind. Bringing product thinking into everything from system design to data modelling decisions.
Aura Talks is a small, invite-only session for data engineers working in this space. We’ll explore how leading teams approach user-facing data: how they structure their models, make trade-offs between usability and scalability, and build systems that are both reliable and meaningful to the end user.
Here’s how it will run:
6pm - Pizza & Drinks
6.30 sharp - First Speaker:
Ben Fraes: Staff Data Engineer at Snowfox Discovery, with a background building commercial data products across energy, sustainability, and climate tech.
Talk: From £0 to £2.6m ARR: Building User-Centred Data Products in Energy MarketsThe talk will focus on lessons from building Guidehouse’s Data Insights subscription platform, particularly the idea that data product failures are often not pipeline failures, but translation failures: turning messy research, assumptions, and domain expertise into structured data that end users can trust and act on.
~6.50 - Second speaker:
Karan Rewari: Staff Data Engineer at Thredd, a global payments infrastructure platform used around the world.
Talk: Building Fraud Detection at Scale - Fast Enough to Be Invisible, Accurate Enough to Matter.
~7.15-8pm - Networking (if you want to hang around, ask questions, meet like-minded people).