Data engineering roles have specialized.
Platform Data Engineer: Builds core infrastructure. Kafka, Spark, data lakes. Scale and reliability focus.
Analytics Engineer: dbt and transformation layer. Works closely with analysts. Documentation and data quality.
ML Platform Engineer: Feature stores, model serving, training pipelines. Bridges DE and ML.
Streaming Engineer: Real-time pipelines. Kafka, Flink, event processing.
Match your prep to your target role. Platform roles test more infrastructure. Analytics roles test more dbt and modeling.