Your application writes data somewhere — then what?

For many software engineers, data engineering is a vague but important layer of the stack: pipelines run, dashboards refresh, reports appear, and somehow the company keeps making decisions. This talk is a practical introduction to what data engineers actually do, how their systems differ from traditional application development, and why building reliable data platforms requires a different set of instincts than building services or APIs.

We’ll look at the core pieces of the job — ingestion, transformation, orchestration, modeling, and data quality — through the perspective of someone with a software background. Along the way, I’ll show where software engineering habits help, where they break down, and how to think more clearly about systems whose purpose is not just to serve requests, but to move and shape data over time.

If you’ve ever wondered what happens after the database write, this talk will give you a grounded mental model of the field and a clearer sense of why data engineering is harder — and more interesting — than it first appears.