How to Answer: What kind of experience have you had working with Data Scientists and what skills do you have in common with them?
Advice and answer examples written specifically for a Data Engineer job interview.
11. What kind of experience have you had working with Data Scientists and what skills do you have in common with them?
How to Answer
Some working in the industry may think that Data Engineers and Data Scientists have some overlap in skills and possibly responsibilities. At the minimum, Data Engineers should have a general understanding of what type of projects Data Scientists work on. At a high level, the two positions differ in that Data Engineers deal with the maintenance, architecture and overall preparation of data for analytical purposes, while Data Scientist create use statistical and machine learning methods to glean learning from the data. As Data Scientists rely heavily on the work of Data Engineers, hiring managers may want to understand how you have interacted with them in the past and how well you understand their skills and work.
Answer Example
"In most of my positions, I have had the opportunity to work with Data Scientists. I met with many of them on a regular basis to better understand their roles and to aid them with their projects. I found that it was not difficult to work with them, because we both understood analytics and were trained in some of the same programming languages. Having these overlapping skills allowed me to more easily understand the Data Scientist's data needs, while she understood the limitations of our infrastructure and the data available. "