“Data engineers are the plumbers building a data pipeline, while data scientists are the painters and storytellers, giving meaning to an otherwise static entity.”

– Urthecast’s David Bianco notes

Data Engineers is a new term to hear but it has a deep conceptual role. Data Engineers are curious, skilled-problem solvers who love building things related to data that would help others. Data Engineers along with Data Scientists and business analysts are a team and responsible for transforming raw data in ways that provides their enterprises with a competitive edge.

In this blog we will know the difference in responsibilities of data engineer and data scientist and how their job roles complement each other.

What is a data engineer?

Data engineers build and optimize the system that the data scientist and analysts use to perform their work. Every company wants their data to accurate and easily accessible. Data engineers make sure that the data is properly received, transformed, stored and easily accessible.

What is a data scientist?  

 A data scientist is a specialist who applies their expertise in statistics and building machine learning models to make predictions and answer key business questions.

A data scientist still needs to be able to clean, analyze, and visualize data, just like a data analyst. However, a data scientist will have more depth and expertise in these skills, and will also be able to train and optimize machine learning models.

Difference

 The main difference is the focus. Data engineering in a nutshell means maintaining the infrastructure that allows the data scientists to build models and analyze data. Basically they are responsible for building architecture and infrastructure for data generation. While the data scientist is focused on advanced mathematics and statistical analysis of the data generated.

Data Scientists are in constant interaction with the infrastructure and architecture built by the data engineers but they are not responsible for building it. Moreover, they conduct high level market research to identify the trends and relations.

What do data engineers do?

 Data engineers deal with raw data that contains human, machine or instrument errors. They integrate, consolidate and cleanse data and structure it for use in analytics applications. Their aim is to make the data easily accessible and to optimize their organization’s big data ecosystem.

What do data scientists do?

 Effective data scientist are able to identify relevant questions, collect data from a multitude of different data sources, organize the information, translate results into solutions, and communicate their findings in a way that positively affects business decisions.