MLOps Community Mini Summit #11! We talked to Snowflakes' Principal AI/ML Architect, Caleb Baechtold, ZenML's Co-founder, Hamza Tahir, and Featureform's Founder & CEO, Simba Khadder, hosted by Ben Epstein.
Huge shout-out to @SnowflakeInc for sponsoring this episode!
// Abstract
Best Practices for Enterprise-Grade MLOps and Governance with Snowflake
Catch this ML expert-led session to learn the best practices for designing and managing enterprise-grade ML development and production systems at scale. You’ll learn how Snowflake ML makes it easy to rapidly develop and prototype new ML projects while ensuring production ML systems deploy and operate in a secure, governed manner.
Laying the Foundation for Enterprise MLOps: Workflow Orchestration with ZenML
Effective ML orchestration is the foundation of successful enterprise AI systems, connecting data processing, training, and deployment into reproducible workflows. This session explores how ZenML provides the critical pipeline infrastructure that enables teams to standardize their ML processes while maintaining flexibility.
Operationalizing Data for Agents and Models with Featureform, MCP, and Iceberg
For years, feature platforms like Featureform have powered classical ML systems—serving features to models, productionizing transformations, and helping ML teams scale. But the rise of LLMs and agentic workflows is fundamentally expanding the surface area of the ML platform, introducing new patterns for how data is consumed and acted on. In this session, we’ll explore the next evolution of the feature platform: one that supports both real-time and batch pipelines, bridges traditional ML and agentic systems, and makes data accessible through interfaces like MCP.
// Bio:
Caleb Baechtold
Caleb is a Principal Architect for AI/ML in the Applied Field Engineering office at Snowflake. He is the global field lead for the Snowpark and Snowflake ML ecosystem. His background is in theoretical mathematics and philosophy. Prior to Snowflake, he was a practicing data scientist and machine learning engineer primarily in the defense and intelligence contracting industry. Caleb is based out of Denver, CO.
Hamza Tahir
Hamza Tahir is a software developer turned ML engineer. An indie hacker at heart, he loves ideating, implementing, and launching data-driven products. His previous projects include PicHance, Scrilys, BudgetML, and you-tldr.
Based on his learnings from deploying ML in production for predictive maintenance use cases in his previous startup, he co-created ZenML, an open-source MLOps framework to create reproducible ML pipelines.
Simba Khadder
Simba Khadder is the founder and CEO of Featureform, the virtual feature store that empowers data scientists to define, manage, and serve model features using a Python framework. He began his machine learning career in recommender systems, where he architected a multi-modal personalization engine that enhanced the experiences of hundreds of millions of users. Later, he open-sourced the data platform that powered this model and built a company around it, Featureform. Outside of ML, Simba is a published astrophysicist, an avid surfer, and once ran a marathon in basketball shoes.
// Related links
Snowflake Developer Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxgY7r-o_ql8ADIdyiQr3Zw
ZenML website: https://zenml.io
Featureform website: featureform.com
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Connect with Hamza on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamzatahirofficial/
Connect with Simba on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simba-k/
Timestamps
[00:00] Introduction
[01:19] Enterprise MLOps with Snowflake ML
[17:53] Workflow Orchestration with ZenML
[40:04] Operationalizing Data for Agents and Models with Featureform, MCP, and Iceberg
[52:17] Q&A
[1:01:59] Wrap up