Is Data Engineering the Future? And What Does It Mean For Your Web Experience?

BuzzFeed is often described as a brand who changed the Internet. The news and entertainment site continues to find new and interesting ways to curate content and sees a dramatic growth throughout the years. So, it’s no surprise that the company is looking at where to go next, and they gave a hint into that by purchasing a data engineering company based out of New York.

But what is data engineering, and is BuzzFeed correct in thinking this is the future? According to Data Science Central, “Data engineers are the designers, builders and managers of the information or ‘big data’ infrastructure.”

Data engineers analyze the “big data” and figure out how to use it when results are returned — as well as making sure those processes are running with no bumps. They are the ones responsible for “finding, organizing, cleaning, sorting and moving data.”

The Google or Facebook algorithms are a good example of this. The significance of this is that in the future your BuzzFeed experience might be personalized to you — just like Google search or Facebook are now.

BuzzFeed CTO Mark Wilkie told TechCrunch that the new data engineers were brought in to complement their 10-person data science team and a few data engineers already on staff (a data scientist is different from a data engineer in that they take the information obtained by this infrastructure and turn it into useful results).

“We wanted to double down on big data,” Wilkie said.

With BuzzFeed looking to find out even more about their readers, don’t be surprised if other websites make big movement in data engineering as well.