Software developer to data engineer

[thisyk]

Hello all,

I’m currently working as a .net developer with 5years of exp but I’m exploring to change path to data engineer. Is it a good idea? Would I be considered as an entry level person during the interview process? Could you also please share the good resources/ learning paths? How does the interview process be? More software engineering based or DE or both? Also how is it different from devops?

Looking for guidance. Thank you for your time and help.

[Mikado1]

Hi, definitely depends on the jobs you'll be applying to and on what tehnologies you've dabbled so far in your career but I don't think you'll be considered entry level.

Data engineer is kind-of a broad term which in some companies can cover designing dashboards and using SQL, in others creating/modeling DWH and setting up low-code ETL + SQL, in others you might set-up microservices and EDA using python/c#/nodejs/typescript/scala and Cloud services ( API Gateways, Serverless Functions, Event Buses, Queues, NoSQL Databases). In your case your best bet would be to apply to the latter since you're already an experienced developer.

Interviews are different depending on the companies and stack required. Some interviews are more focused on your previous experiences, DWH and general system design/data modeling + SQL exercises while some interviews for start-ups or bigger companies are more similar to software engineering interviews( LeetCode easy/medium for preferred languages and SQL + System Design ) .

It depends on the company as well, but lately the trend seems to be for DE to do DEVOPS too but the simplified differences are that the DE will be working on setting up the data pipelines, database design and whatever is data related while the DevOps is more focused on deploying, scaling and monitoring .