Motivation The more experience I become a data scientist and machine learning engineer, the more convinced I am that data engineering is one of the most critical and foundational skills in any data scientist's toolkit. I find this to be true for both evaluating projects or job opportunities and scaling one's work on the job. I will make a post later to point out the difference between a data scientist, machine learning engineer and data engineer. However, until that, I personally think there is a huge overlap between those roles. I worked as a machine learning engineer for almost two years before pursuing data science path. By the time I worked as a machine learning engineer, my role was working closely with data scientists to build recommendation systems for customers who use the company's products as well as building predictive modeling for other departments in the organization. While I do really enjoy what I did but, to be honest, I prefer to spend hours at th...