Data engineering is the practice of designing and building systems for collecting, storing, and analyzing data at scale. It is a broad field with applications in just about every industry. Organizations have the ability to collect massive amounts of data, and they need the right people and technology to ensure it is in a highly usable state by the time it reaches data scientists and analysts.

In addition to making the lives of data scientists easier, working as a data engineer can give you the opportunity to make a tangible difference in a world where we’ll be producing 463 exabytes per day by 2025.

That’s one and 18 zeros of bytes worth of data. Fields like machine learning and deep learning can’t succeed without data engineers to process and channel that data.

What does a data engineer do?

Data engineers work in a variety of settings to build systems that collect, manage, and convert raw data into usable information for data scientists and business analysts to interpret. Their ultimate goal is to make data accessible so that organizations can use it to evaluate and optimize their performance.

These are some common tasks you might perform when working with data:

  • Acquire datasets that align with business needs
  • Develop algorithms to transform data into useful, actionable information
  • Build, test, and maintain database pipeline architectures
  • Collaborate with management to understand company objectives
  • Create new data validation methods and data analysis tools
  • Ensure compliance with data governance and security policies

 

Working at smaller companies often means taking on a greater variety of data-related tasks in a generalist role. Some bigger companies have data engineers dedicated to building data pipelines and others focused on managing data warehouses—both populating warehouses with data and creating table schemas to keep track of where data is stored.

Why pursue a career in data engineering?

A career in this field can be both rewarding and challenging. You’ll play an important role in an organization’s success, providing easier access to data that data scientists, analysts, and decision-makers need to do their jobs. You’ll rely on your programming and problem-solving skills to create scalable solutions.

As long as there is data to process, data engineers will be in demand. In fact, Dice Insights reported in 2019 that data engineering is a top trending job in the technology industry, beating out computer scientists, web designers, and database architects.

Data engineer salary:

Data engineering is also a well-paying career. The average salary in the US is $115,176, with some data engineers earning as much as $168,000 per year, according to Glassdoor (May 2022)

Data engineer career path:

Data engineering isn’t always an entry-level role. Instead, many data engineers start off as software engineers or business intelligence analysts. As you advance in your career, you may move into managerial roles or become a data architect, solutions architect, or machine learning engineer.