What is involved in a career in data engineering?

Over the past four or five years, demand for data engineers has been growing and growing as more and more businesses realise that data is their most valuable asset, well after their staff of course.

Because of the specialist skill sets the job requires, the top data engineers have seen a rapidly growing demand for their skills.

So, what exactly does a Data Engineer do..… and what are the pre-requisite skills it takes to become one?

For a starters, there are few degree courses offering training to become a Data Engineer… it is much more than software engineering practices. Data Engineers complement the data science function. The Data Scientists concentrate on the maths – the engineers work firstly on the technical side, primarily building data pipelines.

A data science team may start to unearth new insights from an organisation, but without effective data engineering this cannot be built into the day-to-day analytics and reporting that ensure the smooth running of the organisation. The Data Engineers ensures data is cleaned and prepared for analytics down the line.

A Data Engineer can have a variety of roles covering data warehouses, data infrastructure and architecture, data platforms, analytics and DevOps. To fill a data engineering role, you will need strong developer skills – especially writing scripts and some code, so a strong programming background makes a lot of sense and a genuine love, or at least an interest, in data. A credible track record of working with things like SQL and Python are helpful as well as the theories and practice of ETL (extract, transform and load).

Being able to create complex systems to reliably handle large volumes of data, coming from disparate sources where the data can be rolled into data pipelines that will help make sense of it all is also key. A cool-headed approach to coding will ensure the infrastructure you create will be reliable – critical – and to avoid changes breaking any of the parts.

Most work is now done in the Cloud, so total familiarity and mastery of one or more of the big three computing service providers will have to feature highly on that CV. Experience of Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure infrastructure are useful and all take time to gain the necessary experience.

DevOps experience will prove invaluable along with skills as a DBA (database administrator).

Our budding Data Engineer has to be able to ensure that the data pipelines, that acquired data is processed through, work, both in practice and in theory!

Very often the Data Scientists and Analysts in your company are your internal customers and need to be looked after.

As in many walks of life, finding the best way of picking up the requisite skills is as much a challenge as the job itself.

Speak to any successful Data Engineer and they are likely to stress experience was as important as education.

Experience in the real world is the best education and there is definitely a crossover from having a software background with DevOps experience for those looking to make a move into data engineering. Some experience as a Data Analyst to get a feel for the value data brings to a business, can only help, on top of a knowledge of software development and an interest in statistics and maths.

As one leading Data Engineer said: “Data Engineers are responsible for acquiring data for Data Scientists and Data Analysts, who need all the company’s data available in a format that lets them query it with the tool of their choice. The Data Engineer has to migrate it from where it lives and transform it so that it makes sense to the data scientists and data analysts. That may require aggregating it and running statistical methods to derive higher insights.

For example, if a mobile app generates 10,000 events per second, chances are you’re going to have to do some transformation on that raw data to make it useful for the rest of the data team.”

As with most things in the world of data engineering, nothing stands stills, so every Data Engineer needs to be able to adapt to ever-changing technology. It’s a lifetime’s work and there is no simple future-proofing that career.

The job will never be the same from year-to-year so as in most walks of life, finding a great teacher and mentor early in your career will be a blessing and the quickest way to learn well.

So, if that kind of challenge excites you, you could be heading along the right pipeline…