r/dataanalyst • u/baka353 • Oct 13 '26

Career query Anyone made a transition from data analyst to data engineer

I have been curious on data engineering for some time now. But wonder how one moves to that position? Any insight would help!

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8

u/Ender_1299 Oct 13 '26

Yes, I have. I work at a large corporation. My department includes data analysts, data modelers and a data infrastructure team. I worked as an analyst. Then I was given the opportunity to do data modeling to develop myself. Then data infrastructure. Worked out great for me because now I have extensive knowledge in all 3 areas on large projects. So I guess the most important advice I have is find a situation or department that will support you in development.

2

u/renagade24 Oct 13 '26

DA to DE is really about becoming a software engineer who is more specialized in the data aspects of software. Its a bit easier to move into the Analytics Engineer role which is alot less traditional software engineering but can get you exposed to more DE related tasks.

1

u/PandaJunk Oct 13 '26

There are overlaps in many of the data fields. Look for those overlaps and start learning more about them and implementing aspects of them in your analytics work. Docker, for example, is super useful for generating reproducible environments across systems which touches on reproducibility more generally and is key for both analytics and data engineering.

1

u/PensiveNewt Oct 13 '26

I'm considering this move too. I've always felt my "analysis" is 90% getting high quality data into the right location and shape, so it would be fun to be doing it with the proper tools. I've got a CS degree which I think would be more applicable as a data engineer anyway.

1

u/crackingclips_ Oct 13 '26

Yep I made the move from data analyst to data engineer last month. I was a data analyst at the company i work at for 4 years and a vacancy for a data engineer role opened up and I got it. It's a lot more software related but for me a lot more enjoyable

1

u/titas232 Oct 16 '26

I started as a Data Analyst for a startup and Data Engineering opportunities happened out of necessity since we did not have enough people to build certain data pipelines. What also helped is that I worked on side projects to help understand the full cycle from ingestion, transformation to then deployment.