What do Data Engineers Do?

Collecting data: Before starting any work, data engineers need to gather data from the right sources. After adopting some dataset standards, the data engineer stores the upgraded data.

Building Data model: Data engineers use data model to integrate data from various sources. In addition, the data model is used for data analysis or data science purpose, so the data model must meet the requirements from data analysis or data sciences teams.

Processing data: data comes from various sources with various quality and format. Data Engineer are supposed to cleanse, transform and deduplicate these data to meet the data standard of the project.

Building data infrastructure: A Data Engineer is also responsible to build the infrastructure required for optimal extraction, transformation, and loading of data from a wide variety of data sources using SQL, Python and ‘big data’ technologies. We call this a data ‘pipeline’. Data Engineers will also automate the data pipeline in the production stage.

Continuous Optimizing the data delivery process: As a Data Engineer, you need not only to know how to build a data delivery process, you also need to be familiar how to optimize the entire data pipeline through the coding and infrastructure level.

Testing: After the codes have been developed, Data Engineers will run a set of testing processes, like Unit testing, Integrated Testing and so on. The main reason why the codes are tested by Data Engineers internally instead of by testing team is that in many cases only the Data Engineers have skills and knowledge to create testing cases and check testing result.

If you want to know more information, please watch our videos:

Data Engineers’ Responsibility

A Data Engineer’s daily work