A Day in the Life of a Google Data Engineer

The Data Engineer has been gaining popularity in the past 10 years, but what exactly do Data Engineers do? Data Engineers in my experience wear many hats, and often sit in the middle of a triangle of Business Intelligence, Software Engineering, and Data Science. One primary role of the Data Engineer is to partner with downstream teams, such a Business Intelligence and Data Science to understand the data needs of the business, and build data integrations to supply these data. The other role can be to partner with Software Engineers to consume application data; typical of new software development efforts, or "0 to 1" projects. Data Engineers are often hidden in the shadows; monitoring data quality dashboards, listening to engineering sprints, and eavesdropping in analytics meetings.