The key to understanding what data engineering lies in the “engineering” part. Engineers design and build things. “Data” engineers design and build pipelines that transform and transport data into a format wherein, by the time it reaches the Data Scientists or other end users, it is in a highly usable state. These pipelines must take data from many disparate sources and collect them into a single warehouse that represents the data uniformly as a single source of truth.

Sounds simple enough but a lot of data literacy skills goes into this role. This is why Data Engineers are in such short supply and why there is confusion around the role. The figure below is one example of the activities involved in data engineering.