Introducing analytics engineering

In early 2019, in a blog post from the Locally Optimistic community, the term analytics engineer emerged to describe the need for a new role born out of new challenges in the data landscape. When working with data at scale, many companies face difficulties with traditional data teams, where data engineers and data analysts’ work is often siloed. Shortly after, dbt Labs – the company that developed dbt (data build tool), an open-source data transformation tool – started a community-wide campaign to promote this new job title.

Defining analytics engineering

Although currently there are many definitions of what this role entails, for this book we decided to present our own, backed up by years of consultancy experience in the field.

A definition of an analytics engineer

Analytics engineers are the bridge between business and data engineering. By adhering to software engineering best practices, they build and maintain robust...