In today’s digital world, we are extremely habitual with social applications and using them extensively, something that causes rapid growth in data. Billions of users use social media platforms daily to share information, upload and download images, videos, and many more things. So here comes the vital role of Big Data analytics which is not an overhead anymore. Big data is helpful to achieve growth and defeat competitors.
The big data market is increasing rapidly as it generates maximum revenue from the services segment in 2020. Its reports are also helpful in creating business strategies to make the most of future growth opportunities. The big data market will witness an incremental growth of over USD 247 Billion at almost 18% CAGR during 2021-2025. So several companies are adopting big data technologies to store and analyze vast amounts of data. These technologies provide cost-saving and time-saving services to achieve goals smoothly.
Big data technologies are highly innovative and provide meaningful market insights and trends. The biggest benefit of big data technologies is that it is social media listening that leads to customer acquisition. Therefore almost all major organizations are seeking certified big data engineers to handle their data for business growth. Also, there is a rising demand for Data engineer online courses to start a career in this evolving domain.
So this article will throw light on the roles and responsibilities of big data engineers.
What is a Big Data Engineer?
A Big Data engineer is an IT ( information technology) professional who can design, create, test, and maintain complex data processing systems in order to work with large data sets. These data engineers are responsible for aggregating, cleansing, transforming, and enriching different forms of data so that data customers like data scientists and business analysts can extract information systematically. Big data engineers interact with huge data processing systems and databases in large-scale computing environments. They can also provide companies with analysis that helps them improve their performance, predict upcoming changes, identify market demography and market trends.
Big Data- big data is the data that contains greater variety arriving in increasing volume with more velocity. It is also known as a larger and complex data set that is generated from new data sources. These data sets are so huge and voluminous that traditional data processing software can’t handle them. The New York Stock Exchange is a great example of Big Data that can generate about one terabyte of new data every day. Social media platforms are another big example of big data where around 500+ terabytes of new data are generated into the databases of social media sites like Facebook, per day, in the form of message exchange, video upload, putting comments, etc.
So the question is, how can this massive amount of data be managed? The answer is that Big data engineers can handle this huge and complex amount of data with advanced tools and techniques. Let us have a look at how big data engineers perform their duties in real-time data operations.
Roles and Responsibilities of Big Data Engineers
The role of data engineers has come into the spotlight now as data, and its related fields have undergone a paradigm shift. There are several big and small tasks and responsibilities that data engineers have to perform during their working operations. Their main job is to lay down the foundation of a database and its architecture. Data engineers access a huge amount of requirements and apply relevant database techniques to build a robust architecture.
However, Big data can be quite a confusing concept to grasp and requires a different engineering approach. If we talk about the market, the demand for data engineers is growing rapidly as many data engineering positions typically require big data skills. A report from Dice Tech Job Report says that the average time to fill a big data engineer position is about to increase as many companies compete for available talent to manage their big data infrastructure, in the year 2020.
Let us know about the role of a big data engineer. These engineers stay behind the scenes. They develop and maintain big data infrastructure, which is the first and foremost work for them. We can better understand their role with the following table.
Big Data Engineer’s responsibilities–
- Big data engineers are the designers and the architecture of the big data platform.
- They gather a large amount of data from different sources.
- They develop, test, and maintain big data solutions for their organization.
- They maintain a data pipeline.
- They ensure the company’s data pipeline is scalable, secure, and able to serve multiple users.
- They also ensure that downstream users can access the data quickly and efficiently.
- They design, create and implement Big data tools and frameworks and implement ETL processes.
- They also collaborate with development teams, create cloud platforms, and maintain the production system for the development of company applications.
- They maintain and customize integration tools, warehouses, databases, and analytical systems.
- They set up data access tools for data scientists.
- They manage and structure data.
- They understand the requirements of the company and institutes scalable data solutions for current and future needs.
- They meet with managers to determine the organization’s Big data requirements.
- They develop Hadoop systems.
- Big data Engineers load disparate data sets and conduct pre-processing services using Pig or Hive.
- They finalize the system and deliver Big Data solutions.
- They collaborate and manage communication between the survey vendor and the internal system.
- Big data engineers also collaborate with development teams and software research for improved big data solutions.
- They also provide training staff on data resource management.
So these are the main job responsibilities of Big data engineers. They require high-level educational and practical knowledge to perform their tasks successfully. They must have deep knowledge of programming skills as well as soft skills like management and effective communication skills. Big data engineers have the ability to solve complex data, networking, and software issues. So they are becoming crucial professionals to any company that is dealing with huge data.
