Analytics Engineer: The Newest Data Career Role
Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash
A few months ago I decided to officially dive into a career change and look for a new job. After weeks of browsing through job postings on LinkedIn, trying to find a role that peaked my interest, I kept noticing a pattern.
While I was working as a data engineer at the time, I wanted more opportunities to be creative and work closely with business teams. My skills didn’t quite fit that of a data analyst but I also didn’t want a traditional data engineer role.
That’s when I came across the analytics engineer.
All the job postings that I was drawn to were for this role. I had never heard of it before but I was intrigued. It just so happened the position was a perfect combination of the engineering skills I already possessed but also the business exposure that I was wanting. It was at that moment that I decided the analytics engineer career path was right for me.
What did these analytics engineer skills look like?
Python
SQL
Data visualization
Strong communication
Let’s talk about the main technologies and tools of an analytics engineer first. One of the most important analytics engineer skills is writing strong SQL. You are expected to write lots of queries and data models, so it’s essential that you practice, practice, practice all types of aggregates and window functions before interviewing for this role. If you need help preparing for these types of coding interviews, here are the top SQL interview questions.
It is also important that you have experience writing code in Python. Analytics engineers typically have more coding knowledge than your typical data analyst. They may not necessarily know software engineering languages like Javascript and C++, but they do know more advanced “data” languages other than just SQL. Python is pretty universal and is used in most data orchestration services and data science models with which analytics engineers come in contact with.
This next one is a big one. Companies typically look for someone who has worked with a tool called dbt before. Not sure what this is? I wrote a whole post explaining the tool and how it is used. The company that created dbt is essentially the same one that molded the role of an analytics engineer! You can’t have analytics engineering without dbt. They go hand in hand.
Like data analysts, analytics engineers are expected to have experience creating impactful data visualizations. It is important that you can communicate any findings from the data to the business teams. What good is an analysis if it isn’t easy to understand and act on? There isn’t one tool that stands out over another but it’s essential that you’re familiar with different ones.
What are the core responsibilities in an analytics engineer job?
You can think of the analytics engineer as the person who manages the company’s data stack. While it’s different depending on how small or large the company is, many of the responsibilities include the following.
Data warehouse management
Data modeling
Data orchestration
Setting best practices
Cross-collaboration
Think about the ETL (extract, transform, load) process; that is what you are in control of as an analytics engineer. You will implement and manage a data warehouse, such as Snowflake, to ingest your data. You will decide on the best tools to ingest your data from different sources into this warehouse. You will model the data to be used by analysts and schedule runs to streamline these models.
Data modeling is a large portion of the day-to-day work. If you’re not sure exactly what data modeling entails, check out this post I wrote breaking it down.
A lot of what an analytics engineer does is build a whole new data ecosystem from scratch. If you want to take ownership of a large project and really make a difference in how a company uses its data, this role is for you.
My analytics engineer career path
I’ve only been working as an analytics engineer for 3 months and have already learned so much. I’ve designed and implemented our Snowflake architecture which acts as a one-stop shop for all of our data. I’ve overhauled and rebuilt many of our core data models in dbt. Right now I am working on deploying these models using AWS Fargate and Prefect.
If any of these responsibilities sound appealing to you, I highly encourage you to check out analytics engineer job postings. Don’t let an unfamiliar title scare you away from a role that could be perfect for you!
