BI Engineer: responsibilities, education, skills and career path

Engineers the BI platform: scalable models, pipelines and governance for analytics.

Entry

Senior

Coding

High

Key skills

BI platform architectureSemantic modellingSQL & data warehousingETL / ELT engineering

Common progression

BI Analyst
BI Engineer
BI Architect

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Career overview

The BI Engineer designs and operates the BI platform at scale: architecture, semantic models, pipelines, performance, governance and CI/CD. They make analytics reliable and fast for the whole company. The role leads to BI Architect, Data Engineer or Data Architect positions.

Main responsibilities

Build BI reports and dashboards
Develop ETL and data integration flows
Model and maintain the data warehouse
Guarantee data quality, freshness and lineage
Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines
Describe infrastructure as code and version it
Monitor platform health, alerts and dashboards
Keep technical documentation up to date
Prepare and execute change requests in production
Mentor junior team members and review their work

Technical skills

BI platform architecture90%

Semantic modelling88%

ETL / ELT engineering85%

SQL & data warehousing88%

Performance tuning82%

CI/CD & IaC78%

Python / dbt80%

Governance75%

Technologies

Power BITableauLookerdbtAirflowSnowflakeBigQueryRedshiftSQLPythonAzure Data FactorySSISSSASTerraformGitDockerKubernetesDAXDatagriddbt Cloud

Education level

Education requirements vary depending on the company, country and experience. Professional experience, certifications and technical skills can sometimes compensate for formal education.

High School / Bac

Less common

Bac+2 (2-year degree)

Less common

Bac+3 (Bachelor)

Less common

Bac+5 (Master / Engineering)

Common entry point