Looking back over the evolution of the data engineering role in enterprise computing, the range of skills needed can be challenging to define. But one expert’s explanation on this evolving position sheds light on why this job came about and what skills and strengths are needed in order to succeed.

“It can become very difficult for domain experts to work closely with the technical experts to be able to actually get business decisions made,” said Matt Wood (pictured), vice president of analytics, business intelligence and machine learning at Amazon Web Services Inc. “Data engineering is allowing those two disciplines to speak the same language — it’s a bridge between the technical implementation and the domain experts and requires a very disparate range of skills: statistics, implementation, data, the domain.”

Wood spoke with industry analyst John Furrier during the recent AWS Summit San Francisco event, an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the role of data engineering and the future of visualization tools. (* Disclosure below.)

Embeddable dashboards and the bottom line

One of the major announcements at the event was the launch of embeddable dashboards, built in QuickSight, which can be seamlessly pasted into outside applications.

“I want those analytics, that visualization … but I don’t want to have to go from my tools where I’m doing my work to another tool to be able to look at that information. So as easily as embedding a YouTube video, you can take a dashboard that you’ve built inside QuickSight, cut and paste the HTML, and paste it into your application,” Wood explained.

The bottom line is often a driver in tech transformation, but as more data becomes available and actionable to companies, keeping costs down is a major factor.

“If you look at kind of the evolution and what customers are asking for, they don’t just want low cost [or a] broad set of services with deep capabilities. They want those services to have as low an operating cost over time as possible,” Wood said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Summit San Francisco event.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Summit San Francisco event. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE