Information engineering (IE), also known as information technology engineering (ITE), information engineering methodology (IEM) or data engineering, is a software engineering approach to designing and developing information systems.

A data engineer is someone who creates big data ETL pipelines, and makes it possible to take huge amounts of data and translate it into insights. They are focused on the production readiness of data and things like formats, resilience, scaling, and security. Data engineers usually hail from a software engineering background and are proficient in programming languages like Java, Python and Scala.