People often ask me what skills needed to become a data engineer. Before answering that question, let's take a look at what data engineer do. According to Coursera

Data engineering is the practice designing and building systems for collecting, storing, and analyzing data at scale.

Data engineering has become the backbone of many applications across industries, and data engineer is an indispensable asset for many organizations.

I like using data to answer questions. I extracted 550 United States data engineer jobs from indeed.com and did some quick analyses using job description, location, and salary range. Although sample size is not big, it should be sufficient to reveal some insights and trends.