What is the career path for a data engineer?

The career path for a data engineer includes jobs as a data engineer, software engineer, and business intelligence analyst.

As you advance along this career path, you might move into more senior roles like a data manager, data architect, solutions architect, or machine learning engineer.

Data engineers have duties like gathering data sets that line up with business goals and needs, creating algorithms to transform data into valuable information, and creating, testing, and maintaining database architectures.

This is an IT professional who conceptualizes and builds platforms that gather, manage, and analyze data. A data engineer aims to make raw data useable for other colleagues, such as business analysts, so they may implement the information into company decisions.

A data engineer makes an average annual salary of $117,234 in the United States. Data engineers and other related roles on this career path are in very high demand.

Here are some essential items on the data engineer career path:

• Education

Most data engineers have at least a bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field. This type of degree provides the foundational knowledge needed in this ever-evolving field.

A master's degree in one of these areas can open up candidates to career advancement, and higher-paid positions on the data engineer career path.

• Skills

There are many essential skills on the data engineering career path. Here are some of the key skills to develop and hone for this career:

• Coding

• Relational and nonrelational databases

• Data storage

• Automation and scripting

• Machine learning:

• Big data tools ( Hadoop, MongoDB, and Kafka)

• Cloud computing

• Data security

• Extract, transform, and load (ETL) systems

Depending on what exact career path you want to take in data engineering you can benefit from the development of skills in some or all of these areas.

• Certifications

There are many different certifications that can help you advance on the data engineer career path. If specializing or working in a general data engineering capacity, you might want to obtain some of the following certifications: