Role and Responsibilities of a Data Engineer

A Data Engineer is a Data Science professional who collects, transforms, and process data according to the need of the business. Data Engineering is one of the most in-demand Data Science jobs. So, if you are aiming for the position of Data Engineer and want to learn more about the responsibilities of a data engineer, this article is for you. In this article, I will take you through some of the role and responsibilities of a Data Engineer that every organization will expect from their Data Engineer.

Role and Responsibilities of a Data Engineer

Below are some of the role and responsibilities of a Data Engineer every organization will expect from their Data Engineer.

Collecting Data According to Business Needs

Every Data Science task begins with data collection. It is valuable to collect the most relevant data to make sense of data. So, it is the responsibility of a Data Engineer to find and gather all the information the Data Science team needs to solve the problem.

So, as a data engineer, you must know database management and web scraping to collect data from your company’s database or website.

Data Cleaning and Transformation

In small organizations, data cleaning and transformations are duties of Data Analysts/Scientists. But in organizations where you see a complete team of Data Science professionals, data cleaning and transformation are performed by Data Engineers. Data Cleaning and transformation are the most important reasons why Data Engineers are in demand.

The data a company gets is unlabelled with lots of missing information. The responsibility of a Data Engineer is to clean, transform and label such data before taking it into action.

Data Warehousing on Cloud Platforms

Data Warehousing means centralizing and consolidating large amounts of data from multiple sources. It helps organizations to get valuable business insights from all the data sources that help in better decision-making.

As a Data Engineer, you should know how to store and manage a company’s data from multiple sources in the cloud. It is one of the responsibilities of an experienced Data Engineer.

Design and Develop Data Pipelines

Data Pipeline is a step-by-step process of data processing elements connected in a series. A data pipeline is designed in a way that the output of one step is the input of the next step.

As a Data Engineer, it is your responsibility to design and develop data pipelines that take raw data as input and prepares it step by step for analytical, modelling, storage, and other data science purposes.