What is a Big Data Engineer? Skills, Resume, Job Description and Salary

Big Data Engineer is mainly responsible for developing, designing, testing, and maintaining complex data processing systems that can work with large data sets. Therefore, a big data engineer is responsible for effectively maintaining and developing an organization’s big data environment.

A big data engineer works on the data architecture and the technology as well as the data management and data preparation processes. Hence in this article, a detailed overview has been provided about the Big Data Engineer.

What is a Big Data Engineer?

A Big Data Engineer is a professional person who is in charge of developing, designing, analyzing, testing, and evaluating the data pipelines. Big data refers to large data sets. Big data is not at all useful unless there are big data engineers to develop the systems by collecting, maintaining, and extracting the data. The main purpose of a big data engineer is to handle large data sets of businesses or organizations.

What is the Role of a Big Data Engineer?

The main role of a Big Data Engineer is to organize and manage the company’s data infrastructure. They are responsible for designing, testing, and maintaining the data management systems which are highly scalable. These types of systems are mainly used to handle extended amounts of data that are too large or complex for the old data processing software. The big data engineers are also responsible for working with multiple big data tools and technologies like Spark and Hadoop to develop robust data pipelines that transform and load the data into these systems.

How to Become a Big Data Engineer?

There are some tips to become a successful big data engineer which are mentioned below:

1. Earn a Degree

If you want to make your career in Big data engineering, you will have to master all the technical skills. Most of the people who become big data engineers pursue bachelor’s and master’s degrees in a related field such as statistics, business data analytics, or science. It is a much-added advantage if you pursue your masters in statistics, data, and coding domains.

2. Work Experience

After gaining your degree, you will need to gain work experience as it is a valuable asset for getting a job for this role. Work experience can be gained by interning with various companies, freelancing, or working full-time for any organization as a big data engineer. The more experience you have in your resume, the more chances to become a successful big data engineer.

3. Gaining a Relevant Certification

Gaining a professional certification can be an added advantage in interviews and resumes. Certification helps the interviewers to get to know about the candidate’s knowledge in their respective fields and it further helps the candidate to secure employment as a big data engineer. Some of the best certifications for big data engineer are mentioned below:

1. Certified Big Data Professional (CBDP)
2. Cloudera Certified Professional (CCP)
3. Google Cloud Certified Professional Data Engineer.
4. IBM Data Engineering Professional Certificate.
5. IBM Data Science Professional Certificate.

What are the Technical Skills Required to Become a Big Data Engineer?

There are multiple skills that a successful Big data engineer should possess, so as to effectively handle large data sets.

1. A big data engineer should know multiple programming languages such as C++. Java and Python.
2. It is mandatory to know about backend databases and SQL.
3. A knowledge of Apache Spark and Hadoop is required to effectively handle the large data.
4. One is supposed to be well-versed in Data mining and modeling.
5. An understanding of the operating system for Unix, Windows, Solaris, and Linux is required.
6. Data warehousing and ETL
7. As a Big Data Engineer, you will need to know about IBM DataStage, Informatica, Talend, and Pentaho.

How to Create a BigData Engineer Resume?

Big Data Engineers should be very careful in making their resume and make sure that the resume is eye-catching. Provide a list of duties, responsibilities, selective frameworks, integration of big data tools, and ETL process. This section parses tips to write an effective resume for a big data engineer.

1. The resume should be clear, have a simple layout, and be informative. Make sure not to add too many different colors to the resume.
2. The resume should be updated. Recruiters get a lot of resumes every day, therefore an updated resume has a higher chance of getting selected.
3. The resume should clearly mention all your experience and the list of activities you have participated in.
4. Always begin with relevant work experience which is related to big data engineering.
5. Add valuable online or offline certifications which will also help to enhance the resume.

Job Description of a Big Data Engineer

Big Data Engineers are skilled like the software developers and they also have proficient knowledge and understanding about coding and development. This is a type of multifaceted role and a big data engineer will have to perform multiple tasks on any day of the week by delivering, identifying, and extracting the usable format. Further, this data is given to others for evaluation purposes. During the work, these engineers have to make sure that the data that is being extracted is valid or not. They also have to deal with the cloud computing environments.

What are the Responsibilities of a Big Data Engineer?

The Job responsibility of a big data engineer is mentioned below:

1. Designing and implementing the systems of the software.
2. Load operations by using Extract Transform (ETL Process).
3. Developing systems for collecting and processing the data.
4. Should have the ability to research new methods for gaining valuable data and improving its quality.
5. Developing structured data solutions by using multiple programming languages and tools.
6. Developing data architecture that meets the needs of the business.
7. Collaborating with the other team members, data analysts, and data scientists.
8. Mining data from various resources to construct efficient business models.

Salary of a Big Data Engineer

Big Data Engineers have a vast range of responsibilities and the salary of a big data engineer in the US is around $90,000 and it ranges from $66,000-$130,000. In India, the average salary is around Rs. 7,00,000 and ranges from Rs. 4,00,000 to Rs. 14,00,000. The salary can vary from country to country. The highly experienced big data engineers can have more than a high package of salary.

Companies that Hire Big Data Engineers

Multiple product-based big tech companies are actively looking for Big data engineers to join their team. Some of the popular companies that hire Big Data Engineer are mentioned below:

1. Google: The role of big data engineers in Google is to design and develop systems that collect and transform the data that is being used to inform business decisions.
2. Microsoft: Data engineers at Microsoft ensure data quality and compliance, and implement scalable data models, transformation solutions, management, and data storage.
3. Amazon: Engineers deal with large data and millions of records per day. They also build different types of warehousing layers, work on operational technology, and evaluate the company’s data.
4. Meta: Build pipelines and produce critical datasets to enable decision-making by using tools like Unidash and Daiquery. They also write code to define the data pipelines, interface with the internal systems, and develop team-specific tools.
5. Adobe: They especially focus on R&D and develop next-generation data platforms that are efficient and also cost-effective. They are also responsible for translating complex functional and technical requirements into detailed designs.
6. IBM: They harness the power of data to unveil captivating stories and intricate patterns. They mainly contribute to data, storage, gathering, and real-time processing.

Conclusion

Big Data Engineers play a crucial role in companies by designing, developing, and managing scalable ETL (extract, transform, load) systems and pipelines for multiple data sources. Therefore, big data engineers are the professionals who help manage, improve, and maintain the existing data warehouse and the data lake solution. Thus, in this article, detailed knowledge has been provided about the Big data engineer, their role, skills, responsibilities, and salary.

FAQs

Can AI replace big data engineers?

While AI automates tasks, big data engineers design and manage systems. Expect more collaboration, not replacement.

Big data vs. data science: what’s the difference?

Big data engineers handle large datasets, while data scientists analyze them for insights. Think of it as building vs. using the library.

How can I break into big data without a specific degree?

Focus on practical skills: coding (Python, Java), cloud platforms, and data tools. Bootcamps and certifications can also help bridge the gap.