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Data Engineer Roles and Responsibilities

Data Engineer Roles and Responsibilities

Everything is going to be connected to cloud and data… All of this will be mediated by software.”

Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft.

And to get the task mentioned in the quote to be accomplished, you need a data engineer.

Related to the same quote, Anand Narayanan, Chief Product Officer at Simplilearn says that a major reason for the rise in demand for data engineers is the mass migration to the cloud.

Times Of India tags the data engineer role as “A job that is almost recession-proof”. When a job is recession-proof, you would want to get into it. There are Data Engineering courses that may let you in.

If there is a job role that has demand across all the industries, it is data-related jobs, and data engineer is on the top of the list. And this makes the impact of recession invisible to this role. A dearth of data engineers has made the salaries shoot high. The disparity between demand and supply of trained and skilled data engineers has increased the job opportunities for the same, and that too with a 20% hike in salaries.

“Analysis is getting distributed for greater scalability. In companies like Uber and Netflix, there are actually data engineers sitting in business functions like product management, retail, or HR, responsible for last-mile data engineering and analysis”, says Prashant Momaya, Director at Solution engineering in Tableau Software.

So, this shows that a data engineer is a powerhouse of a role. To make your career future proof, this is the domain where you should land into. Let’s see the role in brief.

What is a Data Engineer?

Data Engineering is considered to be an aspect of data science that emphasizes the practical application of data collection and analysis. Data Scientists are required to answer questions utilizing large sets of information. They need some mechanism for gathering and validating that information. For that task to finally value, there has to be a mechanism to apply it to real-world operations. This is where a data engineer comes into action. A Data Engineer is needed here to apply science to practical, working systems.

A data engineer is a candidate who plays a vital role in any enterprise’s data analytics team, accountable for managing, optimizing, supervising, and controlling data retrieval, storage, and distribution across the system.

The primary responsibility of a data engineer is to identify trends in data sets and building algorithms for making raw data more beneficial to an enterprise. This is such an IT role that requires a remarkable set of technical skills, that includes a deep knowledge of SQL database design and different programming languages. In addition, you need great communication skills to function across various departments in order to understand what can be gained from the company’s massive datasets.

You should have business goals inline and understand clearly the requirements of the client or company.

What does a Data Engineer Do?

Some of the most important tasks you are required to do as a Data Engineer are:

Data Engineer Roles

The data engineer role is categorized into three major roles.

Generalist:

This is a foundational role that can be found in small teams or small companies. This role requires you to wear different hats according to the situation, as one of the few people in the company who are “data-focussed”. As a Generalist, you are responsible for every stair of the data process, from managing to analyzing the data.

This role is best suited for the candidates who wish to transition their career from a data scientist to a data engineer, as small companies don’t worry about scale.

Pipeline-Centric

This role is generally found in mid-size companies where the pipeline-centric data engineers work parallelly with data scientists to help in utilizing the data they collect. In this role, you need to have a clear understanding of distributed systems and computer science.

Database-Centric

In large scale organizations, where it is essential to manage the flow of data all time, the role of data engineer becomes database-centric. Here, you are supposed to focus on analytics databases. You need to work with data warehouses across different databases and you are also expected to develop table schemas.

To summarize, as a data engineer, you have to manage and organize data, while taking care of trends or inconsistencies that may affect business objectives. A data engineer is a technical role that requires knowledge and skills in programming, computer science, and mathematics. To communicate data trends to other organizations and to leverage the data collected, you need soft skills as well.

Conclusion

To make a transition of your career to data engineering, the most important thing to be considered is that the field is recession-free. Moreover, the average annual salary of a data engineer is around INR 7,55,000, according to Glassdoor.

To accomplish this goal, the sensible step is to take up an online training course to make the transition successful. This makes your learning process easy and trouble-free and gets certified easily. All you are required to do is get yourself enrolled in an accredited online training institute.