What is the difference between Data Scientists V Data Engineers?
Albert Einstein one of the greatest Mathematicians & Physicists of all time
Data Scientist V Data Engineer? As these roles have become particularly sexy in the IT industry we ask what are the real differences?
Since I’ve been recruiting in the Big Data space for the past 4 years I’ve noticed Big Data product development shops & the IT industry in general creating this differentiation...
So what do these two roles actually do?
Data Scientist
Basically a mathematician who uses a lot of mathematical & statistical modelling to work out what they want the data to do. They’re not hardcore developers so tend to use scripting languages (Python) & statistical tooling like MatLab & R Shiny.
Data Engineer
This is a software developer who works with the data to put the rigour & engineering around it to create a robust software product. They’ll code in native languages like Scala for Spark, C++, Java or C#.Net & work with the Big Data platform technologies like Hadoop, HDFS, Spark, TenserFlow etc interacting with tools like Git, Docker and creating UIs for users to interact with BIG Data building these in web - JavaScript, React, Node etc.
So let's check out a few infographics to highlight the differences....
Source: Data Camp blog https://www.datacamp.com/community/blog/data-scientist-vs-data-engineer
Source: Data Camp blog https://www.datacamp.com/community/blog/data-scientist-vs-data-engineer
Source: Data Camp blog https://www.datacamp.com/community/blog/data-scientist-vs-data-engineer
So I hope that helps explain the differences and no doubt as this fascinating area continues to grow (or should I say scale ;-) other roles will continue to morph.
We currently have a variety of Data Science & Data Engineering roles live in Christchurch, New Zealand please check out:
I'm Founder & Principal Consultant of Sunstone, an IT Recruitment & HR company specialising in recruiting IT roles within data science, data engineering, software, web, mobile, development & networks in Christchurch & South Island of New Zealand.