What is data engineering and why is important? An Interview with Dr. Ezgi Demir

The importance of data engineering is increasing day by day. We asked Dr. Ezgi Demir what we were wondering about this subject.

WHAT IS DATA ENGINEERING? AND WHY IS IMPORTANT?

Dr. Ezgi Demir: Today I would like to mention what is data engineering ? and why is data engineering important. Today data engineering continues to grow jobs. In the market, there is increasing demand. When you search you can find everywhere which skills are required or tools required for this job.

All tools or methods to do our job are written on the internet but it is not the main goal of this job.

What is data engineering and why is important? An Interview with Dr. Ezgi Demir

Data engineering is the development, implementation, and maintenance of systems and processes that take in raw data and produce high-quality, consistent information that supports downstream use cases, such as analysis or machine learning.

By the way, if you are doing your job in senior or lead positions, in a highly qualified version, you can take responsibilities intersection of security, data management, data architecture, or software engineering part. Because data engineers can able to manage the data engineering lifecycle, beginning with getting data from source systems and ending with serving data for use cases. These use cases can be for just data analyzing, machine learning, or other data algorithms.

For this reason, data engineers play an important role in creating core data infrastructure that allows data scientists, data analysts, and other end users to interact with data that is necessary for operational systems in the company or in your business.

What ıs the ımportance of data engıneers?

Dr. Ezgi Demir: There is an important difference in here data engineers and data scientists. Data engineers who use platforms, data lakes, and warehouses to extract, transform and load your data. Data analytics and data scientists who use models, and business intelligence and give insights about your data.

These datasets can be duplicated or missing may be hard to access or it could not be easy to push data and integrate this data.

There is a big responsibility to reach your data and make it accessible for everybody. It means that not just for the technical department but also for marketing, finance, and operational departments. This situation can change by the structure of the company. So the data engineers work with other teams in a close way. Communication is an important part of this job.

And we must make sure the end date is understandable for everyone. Thanks to data engineers, data scientists and data analysts, and other members of teams can develop easily models and make more efficient results for the teams by preparing presentations or dashboards. And also data engineers take responsibility for reaching data by layers or historical data.

Also for some companies, data engineers take responsibility for data security and data management systems. At this point data operations tools and management systems can be changed for each company. But the person who wants to be “a data engineer” must learn at least one programming language (especially the main structure), one of database management systems like MySQL, PostgreSQL, elastic search, etc., and one data visualization tool like Powerbi, Tableau, Qliksense.