During my five years at Wayfair (2015–2020), I spent my first two years building internal tools within Warehouse Management Systems. As the demands of our data workflows evolved, my work naturally led me to transition our legacy, cron-based pipelines into event-driven architecture. To overcome key limitations in the upstream open-source code, I researched, modified, and provisioned Wayfair’s earliest Kafka Connect clusters. To scale this impact, I founded a new Infrastructure team dedicated to supporting event-driven systems company-wide, serving as an internal consultant to help engineering teams migrate from database polling to real-time stream processing.