What to Know Before Building a Data Engineering Team

There’s no one size fits all when it comes to building your data engineering team. What you’ll need in your team will depend on the industry you’re in, your company’s size, what stage your company’s at, where you’re headed, and the solution you choose to use. You’ll also need to consider how your data team fits in with the rest of the company, what kind of influence they may have. All these factors are important, and understandably overwhelming. 

If you don’t start on the right foot, you’ll only struggle more as you try to expand your team. Before you begin your search, make sure you have specific answers as to where your product and company is headed. 

When Do You Need a Data Engineering Team?

The data engineering layout comprises the following stages: source, production, storage, analytics. Generally, the initial and final stages don’t change. 

Say your product is an application. The analytics stage measures how users interact with your application. You don’t need a data engineer to collate and analyse this data. With time, as users become more tech savvy, their needs become more complex than what your application can currently offer. This is where data engineers come in: to build layers within the production stage to upgrade the application. 

Over time, as the amount of data involved grows, layers would need to be built within the storage stage. Your data engineering team should help you build data lakes, warehouses and marts as well as pipelines to tie the stages together. 

New requirements will demand that different layers be built. What needs to be built and the stage your company is on then requires different skills from your team. As you work out where your company is, it’s as important to also define where you want to see your company six months or a year from today. If you’re in a startup, I suggest being clear on monthly goals. This gives you a better sense of the layers that will need to be built, and the skills your team would need to build them.