Kendall Barber-Mayo, owner of Wide Open Tech, smiling in a white turtleneck against a blue background

Who is Kendall Barber-Mayo?

Kendall Barber-Mayo owns Wide Open Tech, an Atlanta firm that builds data platforms for companies without a data engineer. He has worked as a data engineer since 2019, at Dealer Inspire (a Cars.com company), Randstad USA, CNN and Whatnot.

Background

Kendall is a data engineer. Since 2019 he has built the ingestion, warehouse and serving layers that products and reporting read from: Snowflake, dbt and Dagster on AWS and GCP, with Python and TypeScript on top and Terraform and Pulumi underneath.

  • Dealer Inspire, a Cars.com company (Data Engineer, 2019 to 2020). Built PySpark ingestion from databases, APIs and FTP sources into AWS.
  • Randstad USA (Data Engineer, 2020 to 2021). Built ELT pipelines on BigQuery and Airflow moving millions of contacts between Salesforce, Iterable and HubSpot.
  • CNN (Data Engineer, 2021 to 2022). Built near-real-time pipelines landing in Snowflake in under five minutes, and moved the data modeling team's releases from once a week to several a day.
  • Whatnot (Software Engineer, Data; a contract role since 2022). Laid the foundation for data contracts across 1,000+ data assets, with every asset owned by a team and alerts routed to that team. Built the company's data-serving platform, which publishes Snowflake datasets to Redis or DynamoDB for the product; 300+ use cases are onboarded, 90+ of them tier 0 or tier 1. Built the attribution layer that shows the blast radius of a schema change before it ships.

Before data, he spent five years at Kroger in Atlanta, as a project manager on new-store and remodel construction and then as a maintenance engineer leading a 19-person team.

Wide Open Tech

He bought Wide Open Tech in November 2024 and runs it as owner. The firm builds data platforms for companies without a data engineer, and he has built them for six companies. He also runs the data platforms and production operations software behind two national franchise systems, used daily by more than 500 operators across the US and Canada.

How he works

Wide Open Tech is AI-native: agents do the delivery work, and Kendall leads every engagement. The agent that checks the work is never the agent that did it, tests are confirmed failing before code lands, and he approves every plan and every merge.

Education and certifications

  • B.S. Civil Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2014
  • Data Science program, Thinkful, 2018
  • Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer (2019)
  • Project Management Professional (PMP), Project Management Institute (2017)

Community

  • Mentor, Code2040

Elsewhere

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