What is a Data Engineer?

A relatively new job title: do you know what it is?

  • Article
  • Data Engineering
Victor-data-scientist
Victor van den Broek
Data Scientist
2 min
01 Feb 2020

A Data Engineer is someone who feels completely at home in seas of data and the technical engineering required to convert that data into meaningful signals and insights.

This can be done in the traditional way with ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) tooling and data warehouses but equally well in a new way in the cloud. Here, the terminology is about streaming data, data pipelines, data lakes and microservices.

Data Science and machine learning models only deliver value when they are in production. Data Engineering is crucial for operationalising Data Science and advanced analytics. 

Someone in the role of Data Scientist works on the substantive, often mathematical side of developing a Data Science or machine learning model. 

A Data Engineer concentrates on the technology, design and architecture of data processing processes. Getting, keeping and continually developing a data science model in production requires this kind of specialist knowledge.

Data Engineer, Business Intelligence consultant or ETL developer? 

Data Engineer is a rather new job title. In the past, this function was also called ETL developer, BI developer, Data Specialist or Business Intelligence consultant – and even though it is not exactly the same, there is certainly overlap with these functions.

Will you soon be working on this as part of our team? Apply for our Data Engineer job vacancy.

Dit kan op de traditionele manier met ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) tooling en data warehouses maar net zo goed op de nieuwe manier in de cloud. Hier gaat de terminologie over streaming data, data pipelines, data lakes en microservices.

Victor: This is an article by Victor van den Broek, Senior Data Science Engineer at Digital Power

Victor is an experienced Data Scientist with a sharp business focus. From his entrepreneurial background, he is always looking for the application of data in your business processes and how you can get maximum value from it, while the organisation remains flexible and agile.

Victor van den Broek

Data Scientistvictor.vandenbroek@digital-power.com

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