Handover pairing when your pipeline author resigns

9 March 2026

Pipeline knowledge often resigns with the person who wrote the jobs. Chat threads and a shared drive folder labelled “ETL stuff” are not a handover.

What pairing actually covers

We sit with the incoming owners and the departing engineer to:

• Walk each extract and transform while the author narrates intent
• Force a controlled failure (late file, empty result, type change) and recover using only the draft runbook
• List secrets, certificates, and vendor contacts that live in private password managers
• Agree who is paged for which failure class after the last day

Timing

Start at least three weeks before the resignation date when calendars allow. One week is possible for a narrow job family; it is not enough for a dozen sources.

Engineer Handover Pairing is booked in half-day blocks so sessions stay focused.