Engineering and data software are overlapping fields that work closely together. While many careers within these fields share some common routes, they each have their own areas of knowledge that make them distinct from each other.
To manage large quantities of information and data at a large scale companies require experts to gather and prepare the data to be used for further analysis. These experts are referred to as data engineers. Data engineers use programming languages to create systems that collect data, transform it and make it more useful to other data specialists like data scientists and Business Intelligence (BI) developers.
As they develop their pipelines Data engineers take into consideration how data is structured, stored, secured and encoded. They could also suggest or implement ways to increase data reliability and efficiency as well as quality. They may, for example, help end users seamlessly integrate data by adding consistent IDs.
Once their ETL is completed Data engineers usually create analytics software to help other users benefit from the company’s information. This includes making visualizations that highlight crucial information points like trends for employees and customers, product performance, and more. They also develop and maintain data platforms that employees can access via APIs or web-based interfaces, such as a dashboard.
To accomplish this, they need to be able to use a variety of storage and databases. For example, they might make use of SQL to query relational databases as well as tools like Python to create more flexible and robust ETL processes. They could also deploy the NoSQL data store like MongoDB, which offers a flexible document-based approach for data management.