Data · career guide

Data Engineer

Pipelines, warehousing and streaming at scale — the engine room behind every AI initiative.

Median salary $130,000 · 42-week programme · from $97/week

What you'll learn

The skills this track builds

Every one of these appears in real job descriptions for this field.

Python programming

Used by: ML Engineer, Data Engineer, Data Scientist, Penetration Tester

SQL & databases

Used by: Data Engineer, Data Scientist, ML Engineer

Data pipelines & orchestration

Used by: Data Engineer

Cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP)

Used by: Solutions Architect, Data Engineer, DevOps/SRE, Cloud Security Architect

Feature engineering & data cleaning

Used by: Data Scientist, ML Engineer, Data Engineer

Containers & Kubernetes

Used by: DevOps/SRE, Data Engineer

CI/CD pipelines

Used by: DevOps/SRE, Data Engineer

Observability & monitoring

Used by: DevOps/SRE, Cybersecurity Engineer

Collaboration & communication

Used by: All roles

Analytical problem-solving

Used by: All roles

The year

Phase 1

Foundations (wks 1–10): SQL mastery, Python, data modelling.

Phase 2

Pipelines (wks 11–22): ETL/ELT design, orchestration with Airflow, cloud warehousing.

Phase 3

Scale (wks 23–32): Spark, streaming with Kafka, lakehouse architecture.

Phase 4

Capstone & placement (wks 33–42): an end-to-end platform capstone, certifications, interview phase.

Certification preparation: AWS Data Engineer Associate · Databricks Certified.

Data

Pipelines, warehousing and streaming at scale — the engine room behind every AI initiative.