Date: May 21, 2026
Time: 10:00 – 11:00 AM PST
Migrating hundreds of databases sounds like a job for a large, specialized team. Plaid did it with six engineers, most without deep database expertise, moving 234 databases across 100 services from Amazon Aurora MySQL to self-hosted TiDB in two and a half years.
In this webinar, Plaid Platform Architecture Lead Zander Hill shares the leadership playbook behind the project: How his team turned resource constraints into an advantage, earned organizational buy-in for a multi-year re-platforming effort, and built compounding automation that made each migration faster and more reliable than the last.
You’ll discover how Plaid categorized services by business criticality to avoid over-engineering, chose controlled cutovers with 60 to 120 seconds of writer downtime over zero-downtime complexity, and frontloaded their riskiest Tier 0 services to de-risk the entire program. The result: Zero downtime across three TiDB upgrades in 2025, each costing only four engineer weeks compared to 12 on Amazon Aurora.
What you’ll learn:
- How to scope a large-scale migration for a small team by aligning to business tolerances, not engineering perfection.
- Why hiring for ownership and operational excellence matters more than deep database pedigree.
- How incremental automation, including runbooks, SDKs, and async job runners, compounds into a decisive speed advantage.
- A risk-frontloading strategy that surfaces critical flaws early and builds organizational confidence.
- How to sustain cross-functional goodwill and low attrition across a 2.5-year infrastructure project.
Speakers:
Zander Hill, Platform Architecture Lead at Plaid
Zander Hill is an engineering leader at Plaid with a track record of reducing downtime, cutting costs, and leading teams through complex migrations. He is a polyglot technologist and problem solver who believes in using the right tools for the job based on technical fit, ecosystem maturity, and team needs. Over the course of his career, he has served as CTO of a 50-person startup, a senior director of engineering, and leader of deeply technical backend organizations. Zander’s experience spans Golang, databases at scale, data pipelines, and distributed, fault-tolerant systems.