About Amberstudent
AmberStudent helps students book their first home away from home. The platform lets students search, compare, and book rental accommodation globally – before they ever land in a new country.
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AmberStudent helps students book their first home away from home. The platform lets students search, compare, and book rental accommodation globally – before they ever land in a new country. For a company whose product is about removing friction from one of the most stressful moments in a young person's life, the same standard applies internally: move fast, stay lean, and never let slow data be the bottleneck.
The Problem: A Small Team, a Growing Integration List
AmberStudent runs a combined DevOps and data engineering function – four people are responsible for the full pipeline lifecycle, from ingestion to delivery. When the marketing team began expanding across Google, Microsoft, TikTok, Facebook, and international platforms, the need for a reliable, low-maintenance integration layer became urgent.
The team had initially relied on AWS DMS for data movement. But DMS was built for database replication - not for connecting to dozens of marketing APIs across different schemas, refresh cadences, and authentication models. Scaling it would mean building and maintaining each connector from scratch, and with a team of four, that simply was not sustainable.
To ensure our engineering efforts remain focused on high-impact innovation, we moved away from managing complex integrations in-house.
As Head of Engineering, my priority is maintaining a lean, highly scalable team that doesn't get bogged down by the increasing weight of infrastructure maintenance.
Why Hevo: Simplicity Designed for a Lean Team
The team evaluated options and landed on Hevo for three reasons that mapped directly to their constraints: breadth of pre-built connectors, ease of integration, and reliability that would not require constant supervision.
The connector breadth was non-negotiable. AmberStudent needed Google, Microsoft, TikTok, Facebook, Zendesk, Zoho Desk, and pipelines for markets including China. Hevo covered them all out of the box. In a larger organisation, standing up a new pipeline might take four or five days. At AmberStudent, the standard is one day. Hevo made that possible without hiring more people.
Within a day, the pipeline has to go live. That's where Hevo helps us — we can integrate different sources quickly, and we already have Hevo, so we keep onboarding new use cases onto it.
The Impact: Stability, Speed, and More Time on What Matters
Today, roughly 80% of the data flowing into AmberStudent's Redshift warehouse is marketing data – platform performance, user acquisition, regional traffic patterns, and conversion rates across channels. The remaining 20% covers chat data from Zendesk and Zoho Desk, used by the product and sales teams to understand user journeys and support quality.
Across all of this, the team has had almost no pipeline failures. That zero-maintenance reality is not incidental — it is the design goal. "The stability and maintenance aspect is definitely one particular thing we were looking at," Dinesh explains. "We haven't faced almost any issue from Hevo's side." For a four-person team, every hour not spent debugging a broken pipeline is an hour that can go toward building the next thing.
The marketing, sales, product, and supply teams now work off Tableau dashboards that surface daily and sub-hourly data cuts: which platform is driving acquisition, which region is converting, which device types are trending. Decisions that once waited on slow data now happen in the same day. The pipeline is transparent — teams know where their data comes from, and they trust it.
The top benefits are time saved, stability where I don't spend time on maintenance, and the variety of pipelines I can integrate. We have very good support for all major marketing platforms.
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