Data engineer

A data engineer builds and maintains the infrastructure that moves and stores data so analysts and data scientists can use it. They design data pipelines that ingest, clean, and transform data from many sources, build and tune databases and data warehouses, and ensure data flows reliably, accurately, and at scale.

The role is software engineering applied to data plumbing, requiring strong programming, distributed-systems knowledge, and tools like SQL, Spark, and cloud data platforms. Data engineers are the foundation the rest of the data team depends on — without their pipelines, the analysts and models have nothing reliable to work with.