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The Role & Responsibilities of a Big Data Engineer

sharmaniti437 August 27, 2018

With the humongous inflow of data, organizations are in deep need of people with the capability of making sense out of the different types, formats as well as sizes of data stored with them. Among such people, Big Data Engineers are the really important ones who have the potential to analyze massive amounts of unclean data and make it useful for companies.

Every organization today is already using or planning to use Big Data for the betterment of their company’s revenues. As it helps them make smarter business decisions and have a better understanding of their overall organizational needs.

Data Engineers assist such companies in analyzing their data and help them get an in-depth understanding of what it means to help them grow their business. This is why every organization that wishes to explore the power Big Data requires Big Data Engineers to help it do so.

Therefore, there is a huge demand for Professionals with Big Data Engineering skills which makes this a golden period for them to show off their talent and earn immense success. However, not everyone can become a Big Data Engineer as it requires talent as well as the right type of education.

What does it take to become a capable Big Data Engineer?

It is fortunate for people aspiring for a career in Big Data Engineering that there are a large number of courses that have been designed to provide professionals with appropriate knowledge on the subject. From attaining a bachelor’s & a master’s degree in a science related field to earning Big Data certifications, there are multiple ways for people to hire as Big Data Engineers.

Once you are employed as a Big Data Engineer, there is a range of tasks that you will be expected perform. Though your coursework is sufficient enough to provide you with most of the theoretical knowledge you will need to carry out your job responsibilities, you will pick up some of the essential skills when you apply that knowledge in real life.

What are the activities performed by a Big Data Engineer?

Here is a list of functions that a Big Data Engineer should know how to carry out:

Data Analysis

  • The skill to perform Data Analysis is a mandate for every Big Data Engineer for which he or she needs to a strong understanding of Hadoop, IBM Biginsights, MapReduce, MapR, Hortonworks and so on.
  • An expertise in data mining is something a Big Data Engineer cannot do without as it is one of the most crucial aspects of Data Analysis. And to perform data mining, it is highly important for them to know technologies such as Mahout.
  • Statistical analysis is also a key part of their jobs which requires them to have knowledge of SAS, R, MATLAB, SPSS etc.

Data Warehousing

  • Big Data Engineers are responsible for carrying out data warehousing which cannot be done without knowing how to apply either MS SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle or any of the other relational databases.
  • The data that is available with today’s organizations are generally not structured as well as relational. So, in order to deal with such kind of data, a Big Data Engineers needs to have a working knowledge of non-relational databases such as HBase, NoSQL, Cassandra, HDFS, CouchDB and more.

Data collection & transformation

  • In order to collect data which is one of their major responsibilities, Big Data Engineers are required to be comfortable in using a scripting language.
  • After data collection comes the transformation part where the data engineer needs to transform the data into an understandable format for the data scientists. And to do that they have to be hands-on with ETL Tools such as DataStage, SSIS, Informatica, and so on.



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