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What Do Employers Look For in AData Engineer

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Henrique Santos
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7 views2 pages

What Do Employers Look For in AData Engineer

Uploaded by

Henrique Santos
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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In this video, we will listen to

several data professionals talk about what employers look for in


in a data engineer. This is a very tricky question
because there is no straight answer to this question. Employers look
for an individual who has exposure to a breadth of various data-related
technologies. It really varies from job to job or role to role. For
example, some roles look for individuals who has exposure to
various kinds of data sources, from relational databases to
NoSQL databases, to in-memory databases or key-value stores. And some of the roles
look
for individuals with heavy experience geared towards the
data movement processes. That means they need to be able to
work on moving the data from a variety of data sources, from
RDBMSes to NoSQL databases, from pulling the data from social
media using APIs and loading them into their analytical
databases such as Hadoop. Apart from that they also look for
good analytical and problem solving skills in a data engineer. When I'm hiring
somebody in a data field, there are a number of things I look
for. One is I look for somebody who is inquisitive, somebody who
doesn't just take the data given to them, but asks additional
questions just to figure out what direction to take
something. One of the primary questions I ask when I'm when
I'm interviewing for that particular trade is, I say, hey,
somebody comes to you, they say the database is slow. What do
you do? And I'm not looking for them to say I tune memory. I'm
not looking for them to say I look at this metric. I'm looking for them to ask
questions and think about different directions of slowness
we could come from, things like that. So somebody who is
inquisitive, somebody who can communicate really well;
you're never working in a vacuum as a data professional,
and there's a lot of other people that you're going to
have to interact with. Somebody with a strong work
ethic, somebody who really owns what they work with, and
what they do. Those are all things that I'm really looking
for. I think it is very company-specific. In a big company, data engineer may
be able to have a narrow focus. For example, just building ETL
pipeline while in a small startup, data engineer may need
to wear different hats. And the employer would require,
would expect, the engineer to have very broad skills. In
many cases I think... I think... the SQL, data modeling, and ETL
methodologies, as well as programming skills, such as
Python, are pretty essential ones for engineering. And besides
those technology skills, I believe employers
also want to see curiosity, good communications, and love of learning in their data
engineers. Employers look for skills on RDBMS. They look for expertise on
NoSQL databases. They see if you have any expertise
on schema design. They want to know if you can
work on ETL and ELT. They also want to see if you can
handle streaming data. They would love you to be
able to handle multiple data formats, file formats. They also want to see you to be
able to work on, or to be able to work with, web API's, data
scraping, you know, web scraping. And any kind of even basic data,
analytical skills are looked for. And most importantly, they look
for problem solving and if you can automate any routine work
that has to be done at the workplace. When I'm looking at technical
skills, I mean the technical skills, I'm looking for somebody
who's familiar with at least one of the technologies
I'm looking for; somebody who has a good starting place to go to
to learn deeper in that area. If I'm looking at a very senior
level position then I'm looking for very specific technical
skills because I have a specific technical need that I
need filled. But at a junior level I'm looking for a general
fluency with technology and more soft skills than I am
specific technical skills. And some of that is asking them what
they've done to learn the field. What have they done to... What
courses have they taken? What blogs do they read? What
directions are they taking to learn more? So having the right
credential, a degree or a certificate, is a good starting
point to get noticed. But you also need to be able to
demonstrate that you have the right technical and soft skills
and then stand out from the other candidates. So for
example, what projects have you worked on? Have you done any
technical writeups, presentations, videos in this field? And then there are
soft skills like being able to clearly communicate and
articulate your work. Whether you're a good fit with
the organization is another thing that we look at. For example, if you're going to
be working in a team of people, do you have the skills
for good teamwork?

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