Hire ETL developers who build pipelines that survive production. A working pipeline in development and a reliable pipeline in production are vastly different things. Production pipelines handle: source system outages, schema changes, late-arriving data, duplicate records, timezone inconsistencies, and the 47 edge cases nobody anticipated.
Production ETL requires: Incremental loading — watermark columns, CDC, change tracking for efficient processing. Error handling — retry logic, dead-letter queues, alerting. Monitoring — SLA dashboards, row count trending, freshness tracking. Platform expertise — ADF, Informatica, SSIS, or dbt depending on your stack.