Key Skills Every GCP Data Engineer Should Learn

1. Core GCP Services for Data Engineering

BigQuery – Data warehouse for analytics.


Cloud Storage – For storing raw and processed data.


Dataflow – Stream and batch data processing (Apache Beam).


Pub/Sub – Real-time messaging and event ingestion.


Dataproc – Managed Hadoop/Spark cluster for big data processing.


Cloud Composer – Managed Apache Airflow for orchestration.


Bigtable / Spanner – For NoSQL and globally distributed SQL.


๐Ÿงฉ 2. Data Engineering Concepts

ETL/ELT pipelines – Design, build, and optimize.


Batch vs Streaming Data Processing – Understand use cases and trade-offs.


Data Modeling – Star/snowflake schemas, normalization, partitioning.


Data Quality and Governance – Validation, lineage, and metadata management.


๐Ÿ› ️ 3. Programming & Querying

SQL – Strong fluency, especially with BigQuery dialect.


Python / Java / Scala – For writing data pipelines (esp. with Apache Beam).


Shell scripting – For automation and quick data wrangling.


๐Ÿ” 4. Security & IAM

Identity & Access Management (IAM) – Setting fine-grained permissions.


Data Encryption – In-transit and at-rest.


VPC, Private Access – Networking basics for secure data access.


๐Ÿง  5. Machine Learning Integration (Optional but Valued)

Vertex AI / BigQuery ML – For building ML models directly from data pipelines.


Integration with Jupyter Notebooks – Data exploration and model building.


๐Ÿ“Š 6. Monitoring & Optimization

Cloud Logging & Monitoring (formerly Stackdriver) – Observability tools.


Query Optimization in BigQuery – Using partitions, clustering, and materialized views.


Cost Optimization – Storage vs compute choices, quota management.


๐Ÿ“š 7. DevOps & CI/CD for Data Pipelines

Cloud Build / GitHub Actions – For automating deployments.


Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – Using Terraform or Deployment Manager.


๐Ÿงช 8. Testing & Validation

Unit and integration testing of data pipelines.


Schema evolution handling.


Data backfill strategies.


๐ŸŽ“ Bonus: Certifications

Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer – Great roadmap and learning validation

Learn Google Cloud Data Engineering Course

Read More

Overview of GCP Data Engineering Services: Big Query, Dataflow, and More

What is Cloud Data Engineering? An Introduction to GCP

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