What is the difference between Software Engineer and Data Engineer
Short answer:
Software Engineer is more generic term
Data Engineer is more specific, it indicates that what you do at your work will be within Big Data/Data Analytics domain
Long answer:
Both Software Engineer and Data Engineer are Language agnostic
Software Engineer title can cover a lot of domains, you can be named as Software Engineer regardless if you do Web Apps, Mobile Apps, Embedded Systems or Game Development
Even going deeper within Web Apps/ Mobile Apps this title may apply either if you do Backend or Frontend
Data Engineer is like a subset of Software Engineer domain which indicates that you will be involved in developing systems that do Data Processing like:
- ETL (Extract Transform Load)
- Data Management
- Data Wrangling
- Cleaning of Unstructured/Raw Data
- Collecting the Data
- Making the Raw data consumption ready
Interesting Fact:
When we build large products that are driven by data you can have modules in your system that make use of that data in concrete Business logic and/or display them to users and i would not call that Data Engineering
Modules that are responsible for cleaning, preparing, managing data and presenting them in some reports that use Statistics can be named as Data Engineering
Data Driven systems may use capabilities of Machine Learning but it’s not always the case, a lot of Data Analytics problems may be solved with simple Statistics, but that is another subject…
Post Scriptum:
When i worked at Elsevier i was doing a lot of Data Engineering with Apache Spark but my job title was Senior Software Engineer
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Thanks for reading!
