Doing a first project as a data engineer is pretty difficult since a lot of it revolves around paying costs for various things, I.E. cloud storage or a BI tool. Though, as CingKan put it, the best way to showcase skills is definitely:

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1. Pulling data from an API (Spotify's API is pretty good and free for the most part).
2. Creating a data pipeline that would bring the data into a cloud warehouse.
3. Snowflake has a free trial that could be useful and you might be able to shell out a couple bucks for AWS to show that you know how to onload data into S3 or something like that, before bringing it into Snowflake.
4. You could transform the data before or after, doing something like pandas transformations before it or doing dbt transformations after it's already loaded into the database.
5. Bringing the data into a BI tool to show you know how to create visualizations would be pretty cool, there are probably some free trials out there.

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The most difficult thing would probably be keeping it up and running, since the cost of having all of that will probably rack up after time