The Stack You Actually Need At 15 Engineers

At 15 engineers, a data stack with twelve tools is mostly twelve invoices and one tired person.

The stack I’d recommend for most teams that size fits on a sticky note: one warehouse, one transformation tool (dbt, in most cases), one orchestrator, one BI tool, and whatever managed connector covers your sources.

Add a tool when it solves a specific problem and someone agrees to own it.

What I usually find looks different: a reverse-ETL tool nobody triggers and a data catalog with three entries. The quality tool alerts to a channel everyone muted in March. The observability platform arrived after one bad outage.

Every one of those was a sensible purchase on the day. Together they add integration work, renewal dates and places to look when something breaks, and at this size the same one or two people carry all of it.

Boring has a cost too. You’ll outgrow some of these choices around 50 or 80 people, and that’s fine. Migrating one tool at 60 people is a project. Untangling seven can eat most of a year.

How many tools are in your stack right now? The version with the reasoning per layer: https://thomasnys.com/data-platform-architecture/