What is analytics engineering?

A year ago, I was preparing a presentation for an event and the title slide asked me to fill in my role. I had been hired as a “Data Analyst”, and when I started the role, I spent my time doing normal data analyst things. I pulled data for finance and marketing, analyzed trends and generated insights, and spent lots of time in Excel and Looker.

However, my role had been changing dramatically. Finance and marketing were able to run their own reports. So a normal day for me involved preparing data for analysis by writing transformation and testing code, and writing really good documentation. My tools were no longer Excel and Looker, they were iTerm, GitHub, and Atom.

Was I still a data analyst?

I left the slide blank for the moment, and just before the event, I filled in: “Claire Carroll – Data Something.”

Since then, the industry has begun to adopt a title for what I was attempting to describe – analytics engineer.

What is an analytics engineer?

Analytics engineers provide clean data sets to end users, modeling data in a way that empowers end users to answer their own questions. While a data analyst spends their time analyzing data, an analytics engineer spends their time transforming, testing, deploying, and documenting data. Analytics engineers apply software engineering best practices like version control and continuous integration to the analytics code base.

Am I an analytics engineer?

The term “analytics engineer” is pretty new, and a lot of people doing analytics engineering work don’t go by this title (I didn’t a year ago!). So how do you know if you’re an analytics engineer?

On the surface, you can often spot an analytics engineer by the set of technologies they are using (dbt, Snowflake/BigQuery/Redshift, Stitch/Fivetran). However, deeper down, you’ll notice they are fascinated by solving a different class of problems than the other members of the data team. Analytics engineers care about problems like:

• Is it possible to build a single table that allows us to answer this entire set of business questions?
• What is the clearest possible naming convention for tables in our warehouse?
• What if I could be notified of a problem in the data before a business user finds a broken chart in Looker?
• What do analysts or other business users need to understand about this table to be able to quickly use it?
• How can I improve the quality of my data as it's produced, rather than cleaning it downstream?

Analytics engineers provide clean data sets to end users, modeling data in a way that empowers end users to answer their own questions.

Data Engineer vs. Analytics Engineer vs. Data Analyst

Here’s how I think about the different roles on modern data teams in larger organizations:

The lines between these roles are blurry – some analytics engineers might spend time doing analyst work like deep dives, while others might be comfortable writing production level Python code but realize doing so often isn’t the highest leverage use of their time.

When did analytics engineering become a thing?

If you were on a “traditional data team” before 2012, your first data hire was probably a data engineer. You needed this person to build your infrastructure: extract data from the Postgres database and SaaS tools that ran your business, transform that data, and then load it into your data warehouse.

You would then hire a data analyst to build dashboards and reports on top of this data. Analysts, like me, would maintain a mess of SQL files with names like monthly_revenue_final.sql, or maybe just bookmark their queries in a SQL web editor. Often we would need to supplement data in the warehouse with fancy Excel work.

The people consuming the data–CEOs, Marketing VPs, CFOs–would receive monthly reports, request special analysis as-needed, and send analysts a never-ending stream of requests to “segment by this” or “cut by that” or “hey, we’ve updated our definition of ‘account’”.

Being a data analyst was a hard and thankless job, and it didn’t have a ton of leverage. Because of this, it was often a junior role, one where you “did your time” and then moved on to something else.

What happened to the traditional data team?

Since 2012, there have been huge changes in the data tooling landscape:

• Cloud-based data warehouses (Redshift, followed by BigQuery and Snowflake) made data storage and processing affordable and fast.
• Data pipeline services (ex: Stitch, Fivetran) turned data extraction into work that took only a few clicks
• Business intelligence (BI) tools (ex: Looker, Mode, Chartio) increased ability for stakeholders to be self-service.

By 2016, it had never been easier to get data into a warehouse in a raw form, and for stakeholders to build reports on top of the data.

As data tools changed, so did the people who used them. People who weren’t on data teams began developing data literacy. This was good: business users wanted to self-serve and be data-driven. The downside was that these people often knew just enough SQL to be dangerous. If you’ve ever been to a meeting where two executives have different numbers for the same metric, you’ve experienced the result of this.

The solution: transform the raw data into a shape that’s ready for analytics. At the time, there were only two widely-used options:

• Looker’s Persistent Derived Tables
• Get a data engineer involved

The first was easy enough for anyone with SQL skills and a Looker license to manage, but created a host of maintenance issues. The second meant waiting in a data engineering queue that could take…a long time.

This is when dbt entered the market.

The modern data team

Today, if you’re a “modern data team” your first data hire will be someone who ends up owning the entire data stack. This person can set up Stitch or Fivetran to start ingesting data, keep a data warehouse tidy, write complex data transformations in SQL using dbt, and build reports on top of a clean data layer in Looker, Mode, Redash, etc.

This job is neither data engineering, nor analysis. It’s somewhere in the middle, and it needed a new title. Starting in 2018, we and a few of our friends in the Locally Optimistic community started calling this role the analytics engineer.

Analytics engineers deliver well-defined, transformed, tested, documented, and code-reviewed data sets. Because of the high quality of this data and the associated documentation, business users are able to use BI tools to do their own analysis while getting reliable, consistent answers.

It turns out, your company can get pretty far with a single analytics engineer working as a data team of one supporting a whole business. However, for those companies that need a larger data team, how does this team structure scale? Do you simply hire another analytics engineers? Or do you diversify?

In our experience, we see team members start to become more specialized, with roles that align more closely with those that we started with. Depending on your needs your next hire may be a data engineer, or a data analyst.

The role of an analytics engineer

Analytics engineers create clean data sets for end users. They model data to help users answer questions. This role bridges the gap between data engineering and analysis.

Responsibilities

Analytics engineers transform, test, deploy, and document data. They apply software engineering practices to analytics code. Version control and continuous integration are key examples.

Their day involves preparing data through transformation code. They write tests to ensure data quality. Documentation is another major focus of their work.

Daily tasks include SQL transformations in dbt. They maintain data warehouse structure. They also collaborate with business users on data needs.

Further reading:

• What does an analytics engineer do?
• Analytics Engineer Certification Exam

Qualifications

Junior roles typically require SQL and data modeling knowledge. Experience with version control systems helps new candidates. A degree in computer science or statistics is beneficial.

Individual contributors need advanced SQL and data warehouse expertise. They should understand business domains they support. Previous analytics or engineering experience is often required.

Breaking into the field requires demonstrating data transformation skills. Building projects with tools like dbt shows capability. Online courses can supplement formal education requirements.

Skills

SQL proficiency is essential for all analytics engineers. Data modeling concepts must be thoroughly understood. Version control with Git is a daily necessity.

Knowledge of cloud data warehouses provides competitive advantage. Familiarity with Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift is valuable. Communication skills help translate business needs to data models.

Documentation and testing abilities ensure data quality. Problem-solving skills are crucial for complex transformations. Understanding business context makes their work more valuable.

Salary

According to our State of Analytics Engineering 2025 report, more than 80% of contributors in data roles earned more than $100,000 per year. Location and experience level affect this range. Remote opportunities have expanded compensation options.

This salary exceeds typical data analyst compensation. It compares closely with data engineering salaries. Data scientists may earn slightly more in some markets.

Ready to grow your analytics engineering skills? Check out some of these resources to round out your expertise:

• Analytics engineering: Six best practices for success | dbt Labs
• 16 must-have data engineer skills | dbt Labs
• The next big step forwards for analytics engineering
• Analytics engineering and data engineering: Do you need both? | dbt Labs
• How to hire analytics engineers | dbt Labs

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