Interesting Careers in Big Data

Big Data & Data analytics has opened a wide range of new & interesting career opportunities. There is an urgent need for Big Data professionals in organizations.

Not all these careers are new, and many of them are remapping or enhancements of older job functions. For example, a Statistician was formerly deployed mostly in government organization or in sales/manufacturing for sales forecast for financial analysis, statisticians today have become center of business operations. Similarly, Business analysts have become key for data analytics – as business analysts play a critical role of understanding business processes and identifying solutions.


Here are 12 interesting & fast growing careers in Big Data.

1. Big Data Engineer
Architect, Build & maintain IT systems for storing & analyzing big data. They are responsible for designing a Hadoop cluster used for data analytics. These engineers need to have a good understanding of computer architectures and develop complex IT systems which are needed to run analytics.

2. Data Engineer
Data engineers understand the source, volume and destination of data, and have to build solutions to handle this volume of data. This could include setting up databases for handling structured data, setting up data lakes for unstructured data, securing all the data, and managing data throughout its lifecycle.

3. Data Scientist
Data Scientist is relatively a new role. They are primarily mathematicians who can build complex models, from which one extract meaningful analysis.

4. Statistician
Statisticians are masters in crunching structured numerical data & developing models that can test business assumptions, enhance business decisions and make predictions.

5. Business Analyst
Business analysts are the conduits between big data team and businesses. They understand business processes, understand business requirements, and identify solutions to help businesses. Business analysts work with data scientists, analytics solution architects and businesses to create a common understanding of the problem and the proposed solution.

6. AI/ML Scientist
This is relatively a new role in data analytics. Historically, this was part of large government R&D programs and today, AI/ML scientists are becoming the rock stars of data analytics.

7. Analytics Solution Architects
Solution architects are the programmers who develop software solutions – which leads to automation and reports for faster/better decisions.

8. BI Specialist
BI Specialists understand data warehouses, structured data and create reporting solutions. They also work with business to evangelize BI solutions within organizations.

9. Data Visualization Specialist
This is a relatively new career. Big data presents a big challenge in terms of how to make sense of this vast data. Data visualization specialists have the skills to convert large amounts of data into simple charts & diagrams – to visualize various aspects of business. This helps business leaders to understand what’s happening in real time and take better/faster decisions.

10. AI/ML Engineer
These are elite programmers who can build AI/ML software – based on algorithms developed by AI/ML scientists. In addition, AI/ML engineers also need to monitor AL solutions for the output & decisions done by AI systems and take corrective actions when needed.

11. BI Engineer
BI Engineers build, deploy, & maintain data warehouse solutions, manage structured data through its lifecycle and develop BI reporting solutions as needed.

12. Analytics Manager
This is relatively a new role created to help business leaders understand and use data analytics, AI/ML solutions. Analytics Managers work with business leaders to smoothen solution deployment and act as liaison between business and analytics team throughout the solution lifecycle.