MacLochlainns Weblog

Students often ask me about data engineering. I try to explain some of the aspects, and how the tasks can be organized but I never laid out all the titles. I really like this illustration (click on image for larger size) from the Gartner Group because it does that. You can download the full “What Are the Essential Roles for Data and Analytics” paper here).

An excerpt from Gartner’s paper:

Data Engineer

Data engineering is the practice of making the appropriate data available to various data consumers (including data scientists, data and business analysts, citizen integrators, and line-of-business users). It is a discipline that involves collaboration across business and IT units. This key discipline requires skilled data engineers to support both IT and business teams.

Data engineers are primarily responsible for building, managing and operationalizing data pipelines in support of key D&A use cases. They are also primarily responsible for leading the tedious (and often complex) task of:

• Curating datasets and data pipelines created by nontechnical users (e.g., through self-service data preparation tools), data scientists or even IT resources.
• Operationalizing data delivery for production-level deployments.

I hope the summary is helpful and Gartner’s paper interesting.