Production customer pipelines experienced 14 unrecoverable midnight aborts over the last 21 days due to transient cloud storage throttling (HTTP 503 SlowDown), database connection pool exhaustion, and poison-pill records. Existing monolithic jobs lack retry logic, intermediate checkpoint resumption, and idempotent re-run semantics—forcing on-call data engineers into exhausting 2 AM manual restarts that breach business SLAs. Engineering must implement automated failure detection, exponential backoff retries, stateful step recovery, and Dead Letter Queue (DLQ) routing.