Big Data & Data Architecture Track

Data Engineering Career Roadmap

Master SQL Data Modeling, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Apache Spark, Airflow orchestration, dbt transformations, and real-time Kafka streaming pipelines.

Step-by-Step Learning Stages

1 Weeks 1 - 4

SQL Data Modeling & Dimensional Architecture

Master dimensional modeling (Kimball Star Schema & Snowflake Schema), primary/foreign key indexing, CTEs, PostgreSQL, and Data Normalization.

Star Schema PostgreSQL Advanced Joins & CTEs
2 Weeks 5 - 8

Cloud Data Warehousing & Object Storage

Store and query petabyte-scale data using Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, AWS S3, and Delta Lake format.

Snowflake Google BigQuery AWS S3 / Redshift
3 Weeks 9 - 14

Distributed Processing with Apache Spark

Process massive datasets with PySpark, Spark SQL, Databricks clusters, partition tuning, and distributed join optimization.

PySpark Databricks Spark SQL
4 Weeks 15 - 18

Workflow Orchestration & Transformation (Airflow & dbt)

Schedule DAG pipelines using Apache Airflow or Dagster. Modularize warehouse SQL transformations using dbt (data build tool).

Apache Airflow dbt (data build tool) Dagster
5 Weeks 19 - 24

Real-Time Event Streaming with Apache Kafka

Ingest sub-second data streams using Apache Kafka, Confluent, Spark Structured Streaming, and real-time dashboards.

Apache Kafka Spark Streaming Confluent Cloud

Recommended Portfolio Projects

3 real-world projects demonstrating scalable data pipeline architecture.

BEGINNER

Automated Financial Market ETL Pipeline

Fetch daily stock/crypto API data using Python, schedule Airflow DAGs, and store structured partitions in PostgreSQL.

Stack: Python, Airflow, PostgreSQL, Docker
INTERMEDIATE

E-Commerce Data Warehouse with dbt & Snowflake

Model raw transactional logs into a Kimball star schema using Snowflake, transform data with dbt, and run automated GitHub Actions data tests.

Stack: Snowflake, dbt Core, GitHub Actions
ADVANCED

Real-Time Clickstream Streaming Platform

Produce web clickstream events into Apache Kafka, aggregate 1-minute window metrics using Spark Streaming, write to Delta Lake, and plot live Grafana metrics.

Stack: Kafka, Spark Streaming, Delta Lake, Grafana