Data and engineering software overlap and work closely together. While many of the careers in these fields have some commonalities however, they have different areas of expertise, which makes them distinct.
To manage large amounts of data and information in a large way companies need experts to collect and organize it for further analyses. These experts are known as data engineers. Data engineers use programming languages to develop systems that take data from sources transform it, and make it usable for other data specialists such as Data scientists and Business Intelligence (BI) developers.
Data engineers think about how data is stored, encoded, and secured when designing their pipelines. They may also suggest or implement ways to improve data reliability and efficiency as well as quality. For instance, they can assist in integrating data from different systems by introducing uniform IDs that allow users to seamlessly combine information.
After their ETL is engineering and data software completed Data engineers usually create analytics software to help other users make use of the company’s data. This includes developing visualizations that highlight key data points like employee and customer trends, product performance, and more. They also manage and create data platforms that employees can access via APIs or web interfaces, such as a dashboard.
To do so they must be able to use a variety of storage and databases. They could, for instance utilize SQL to query a relational database and tools like Python for more flexible and efficient ETL processes. Or, they could implement a NoSQL database such as MongoDB with a more flexible approach to document-based approaches to managing data.