Data Engineers design the way of storage, movement, and integration of the data according to the nature of the business the company is into. They prepare data for the data scientists for data analysis and other operational uses. The amount of data the data engineers deal with is dependent on the size of the company. The bigger the company is, the more complex data they work with and vice versa.
In today's world, every business goes digital and has loads of data to handle. Data Scientists help in the analysis of the data to know the growth of the company as well as forecast the profits and sales. To make data available for the data scientists' data engineers are needed, and so, data engineers' jobs are on rising. According to the 2020 Tech job report by DICE, a Jobsite Data engineer is the fastest-growing tech occupation under the year-over-year growth category
Top skills data engineers are expected to have
With the demand for data engineers on the rise, there are some skills the companies look forward to in aspirants. Let us have a look at them.
Python
The software team, no matter which role they are into, should know python. It is the top skill software engineers, data scientists, and data engineers must have. Python is a suitable language that helps in building data pipelines and workflows for data engineering.
SQL
SQL is an important language data engineers should know. It stands for Structured Query Language. SQL is used to get data from relational databases and used to create reusable data structures.
Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark
Apache Hadoop is a framework that has a collection of many open source tools. It is useful for the distributed processing of large data sets across different clusters of computers. The framework supports Python, Java, Scala, and R. Though the processing speed is low and requires many lines of coding Apache Hadoop is the most powerful tool. It supports batch processing.
Apache Spark is the same as Hadoop but supports stream processing ensuring continuous input and output of data.
Apache Hadoop and Spark are good skills to have for a data engineer as data engineering is all about working with complex data pipelines.
Cloud
With the software infrastructure of the businesses migrating to the cloud, cloud platform skills are a must for data engineers. Microsoft Azure is the widely used cloud technology by data engineers, and many of them hold specialization in it.
Big Data
Big data is a must for businesses now. Huge customer databases, purchase databases, the mass amount of social media data, banking service data, etc., are some examples of big data. Data engineers deal with different modes of big data daily, and having the skills of working in it will be a plus for the data engineer.
ETL
Extract, Transform, and Load tools pull data from different sources and analyze it, and then load the processed data into a database or a shared platform which can be used by anyone in the organization. This work is done by data engineers, and hence, these skills are one of the most sought ones.
Java
Java is an extensively used language in the data architecture of the majority of companies. Most of the APIs are also designed in Java. A Data Engineer should have core knowledge about Java. It becomes easy for him to work in applications built in Java.
Data Science
Though it may appear as a different subject altogether, Data Science is closely related to data engineering. The base work of a data scientist is done by a data engineer by creating data pipelines to work with. Data scientists and data engineers work closely for larger projects. So, it is expected to know data science too.
Machine Learning
Machine Learning algorithms or models help data scientists analyze the data and make predictions based on it. Data engineers need a basic understanding of the machine learning models to get the models into production and build data pipelines based on them.