Thndr Scales Governance Across Millions of Investor Accounts with OpenMetadata

Thndr’s six-person data team—two engineers, one data platform engineer, and three analysts—supports a fast-scaling investment platform that powers millions of investor accounts and processes critical financial data. As adoption surged, so did the volume and variety of data flowing through warehouses, pipelines, and dashboards. But without a centralized metadata system, the team had no easy way to trace end-to-end data lineage. Batch ETL workflows, central to Thndr’s operations, required timely, duplicate-free updates, yet quality checks for these jobs had to be performed manually. Essential governance tasks were slow, fragmented, and prone to error. The team relied on manual processes to monitor freshness, detect schema changes, identify PII, and document business terms—tasks that became increasingly unsustainable at scale. Thndr needed an open source platform that could unify metadata management, automate quality checks, and make data assets easier to find, trust, and govern across the organization.

For Thndr, the appeal of OpenMetadata went beyond features; it was about control, flexibility, and community. With OpenMetadata, the small data team at Thndr was able to build a centralized platform for metadata that works the way their team works. The team self-hosted the platform on AWS EC2, orchestrated with Docker Swarm, and connected it to Apache Airflow for workflow automation, Elasticsearch for fast search, and MySQL for storing internal metadata. Data from warehouses, pipelines, and dashboards is ingested directly into OpenMetadata, creating a single source of truth. Alerts flow directly into Slack, keeping incident response in the same channels where the team already collaborates. For production, Thndr rotated JWT tokens and implemented SSO for secure, streamlined access management.

In a fintech environment where data accuracy, security, and speed directly influence customer trust, OpenMetadata has become an operational backbone for Thndr’s data team. By deploying on their own infrastructure, Thndr ensured full control over performance, security, and customization—while the open source model meant they could quickly iterate on new needs with guidance from a responsive global community. Today, OpenMetadata underpins everything from tracing data lineage for regulatory transparency to catching stale or duplicate data in critical batch ETL workflows. What once took hours of manual checking now happens automatically, freeing the team to focus on higher-value analysis and product innovation. With OpenMetadata, Thndr has transformed governance from a reactive safeguard into a strategic advantage. Automated PII detection, real-time quality alerts, and clear lineage give their lean team complete visibility into data flows, ensuring compliance while enabling faster, more confident decision-making. Every dashboard, pipeline, and warehouse table is now part of a connected ecosystem that the team can monitor and improve continuously. The result is a data foundation that not only meets the demands of regulatory oversight but also fuels the trusted insights behind millions of investment decisions every day, building lasting investor confidence at scale.