Responsibilities are going to change depending on the company you work for and what seniority level you are at but generally speaking most data engineers do the following: - **Gather data requirements** such as how long the data needs to be stored, how it will be used and what people and systems need access to the data. - **Maintain metadata about the data** such as what technology manages the data, data documentation, how the data is secured, the source of the data and the ultimate owner of the data. - **Ensure security and governance for the data** using centralized security controls like LDAP, encrypting the data, and auditing access to the data. - **Store the data** using specialized technologies that are optimized for the particular use of the data, such as a [[Relational Database|relational database]], a [[Non-relational Database|NoSQL database]], or blob storage. - **Process data for specific needs** using tools that access data from different sources, transform and enrich the data, summarize the data and store the data in the storage system. %% wiki footer: Please don't edit anything below this line %% ## This note in GitHub <span class="git-footer">[Edit In GitHub](https://github.dev/data-engineering-community/data-engineering-wiki/blob/main/FAQ/What%20does%20a%20Data%20Engineer%20do.md "git-hub-edit-note") | [Copy this note](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/data-engineering-community/data-engineering-wiki/main/FAQ/What%20does%20a%20Data%20Engineer%20do.md "git-hub-copy-note")</span> <span class="git-footer">Was this page helpful? [👍](https://tally.so/r/mOaxjk?rating=Yes&url=https://dataengineering.wiki/FAQ/What%20does%20a%20Data%20Engineer%20do) or [👎](https://tally.so/r/mOaxjk?rating=No&url=https://dataengineering.wiki/FAQ/What%20does%20a%20Data%20Engineer%20do)</span>