The Changing Face of Data Jobs: Analytics Engineering

By Francis Alexander , Senior Principal Consultant at Trust In SODA

Few roles have evolved as much as the data analyst’s over the last few years. It’s a natural response to the changing demands of today’s digital environment, marking an important shift in both the talent market and the way businesses approach their data capabilities.??

Data transformation is one of those demands, and it’s synonymous with the rise of the analytics engineer, a much-needed link between engineering and analysis.?

How did it happen? What does it mean for the talent market? Our data consultants explore in more detail below.??

New Responsibilities?

Where a traditional data analyst typically focuses on consuming and interpreting data, analytics engineers are responsible for building and maintaining the systems that power these insights, effectively acting as a hybrid of engineering and analysis.??

While they share a common goal with their analyst counterparts (to unlock organisational value through data), analytics engineers occupy a distinctly separate set of responsibilities.??

Why did it Happen???

• The Rise of Data as a Product –?As more businesses begin to explore the DaaP route, demand for data analytics engineers has surged as they play a critical role in packaging data products for designed for the end user.??

• Cloud warehousing – Cloud computing offers a way to store and process massive amounts of data, driving demand for talent who can design, build, maintain, and transform this data for analysis.??

• Data Democratisation – Businesses increasingly call for self-service analytics, and analytics engineers can provide the foundations for this by developing more accessible, understandable data models, enabling non-technical teams to leverage their insights more effectively.??

• Explainability – The call for greater explainability (reflected most prominently in the AI and ML space) is a key driver in today’s tech talent market. Leaders are looking for data candidates who can bridge the gap between technical concepts and non-technical stakeholders. The ability to build transparent data pipelines are part of the solution.?

• The Need for Scalability and Agility – Data volumes are constantly growing, and businesses need data infrastructure that can scale to meet these demands.??

• Data Governance Concerns – Between rising security concerns and global? regulatory pressures, analytics engineers are playing a more prominent role in maintaining compliance.??

What Does it Look Like in Action???

It’s not uncommon to see businesses use data/analytics engineering interchangeably, partly because the roles overlap, and partly because of a lack of understanding (as the role is so new and still evolving).??

Typically, the analytics engineer sits a little closer to the business strategy, and there tends to be less backend engineering involved. While SQL expertise is still the backbone of the technical side, analytics engineers rely on low-code tools like Airbyte, dbt, and SQLMesh to streamline data workflows and focus on delivering value more quickly. Expect a bunch of HTML too.??

These tools enable analytics engineers to handle the transformation stage of the Extract, Load, Transform (ELT) process with greater efficiency.??

For example…?

Take fraud detection systems in banking - an analytics engineer might design data pipelines to process transaction data in real-time, create transformation models that calculate risk metrics (like transaction anomalies or geographic inconsistencies), and prepare model-ready datasets for the relevant stakeholders.??

The Talent Market?

Whether you’re hoping to hire or get hired in the data space, it’s tricky to know what to watch out for when the market moves at warp speed.??

Plus, it’s difficult to approach salary conversations when everyone has different ideas of what the role should involve.??

Both data analysts and analytics engineers are among the fastest-growing roles in today’s market, and we don’t expect this to slow down anytime soon.??

Here at Trust in SODA, our data consultants have spent over ten years connecting exceptional job seekers with the best opportunities in tech – in that time, we’ve had the pleasure of making some truly meaningful connections in the data space.???

If you’d like some clarity on the weird and wonderful data market, drop me a message: [email protected].?