Data engineers are responsible for designing, developing and maintaining the data platform, which includes the data infrastructure, data applications, data warehouse, and data pipelines.

 Data engineers are usually divided into different groups that work with a specific part of the data platform:

• Data warehouse & pipelines: Data warehouse engineers build batched and/or real-time data pipelines to integrate data between systems and also support the data warehouse. Since the data warehouse is meant for tackling business problems, data warehouse engineers usually work closely with data analysts, scientists, or business teams that serve a specific business function.
• Data infrastructure: Data infrastructure engineers build and maintain the very foundation of data platform: the distributed systems that everything runs on top of. For example, at Target, the data infra team maintains Hadoopclusters used by the whole organization.

Data applications: Data application engineers are software engineers building internal data tools and APIs. Sometimes, a great internal tool may later become an open-source product of the company.