The Ownership Handoff Checklist

Your only data engineer just handed in their notice. You have about four weeks to get it out of their head.

A two-hour knowledge-transfer call won’t cover it. A lot of what matters is stuff they don’t know they know.

Use the notice period to get these written down:

• Every scheduled job, where it runs, and what breaks downstream if it stops.
• Every credential and service account, and whose personal email it’s tied to. (There’s always one.)
• The manual steps. The CSV someone uploads on the first Monday of the month. The job they rerun every Friday.
• The known lies: tables that look right and aren’t, and why.
• The decisions they never wrote down, and what they’d do differently.

Have them record a screen share while they rerun a failed job. I’d take 20 minutes of that over another wiki page.

Then ask the uncomfortable question now: who owns this on the first day after they leave? If the answer is “we’ll hire someone”, you’re looking at months with nobody on call.

What’s the one thing only your data engineer knows?