What is Data Engineering? — UK Software Development Guide
Direct Answer
Data engineering is the discipline of designing, building, and maintaining the infrastructure and systems that collect, store, process, and serve data at scale. Data engineers build data pipelines, data warehouses, data lakes, and the ETL/ELT processes that transform raw data into formats useful for analytics and machine learning.
Data-engineering in the UK
Data engineering has specific UK regulatory implications. UK GDPR data minimisation applies to data pipelines — you should not process more personal data than necessary, even in a data warehouse. Data retention policies must be implemented technically in data pipelines, not just documented. The ICO has enforcement powers over organisations that retain personal data beyond stated retention periods in data lakes. UK FinTechs building regulatory reporting pipelines (FCA transaction reporting, HMRC CBRC data) require data engineering expertise with regulatory awareness.
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