Data pipelines are sets of processes that move and transform data from different sources to a specific destination. Data pipelines are the foundation of data analytics, reporting, business intelligence, and machine learning capabilities. Data engineers specialize in building and maintaining the data pipelines that underpin the analytics ecosystem.

Data engineers work with data scientists and data analysts to understand the purpose of the data and help bring their needs into a scalable production state.

In the data engineering lifecycle, the ingestion stage is where data engineers begin actively designing data pipeline activities.