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Data Engineer Business Case (Candidate View)

Background Information

Imagine I'm a Power Partners consultant, and you are a data engineer.

Imagine that yesterday, I did a consulting day with a client. I have drawn a wireframe of a dashboard.

You have 50 minutes to come up with the design of the data loads that will help us build the dashboard.

Specifically, you are asked to:

  1. structure the data sources

  2. define how to load the data

  3. create a shortlist of tools, languages, platforms, etc. that we could use to do the job

  4. define a rough reporting data model (semantic model - we call it ADM, Analytical Data Model)

  5. come up with a rough estimate

You will be measured:

  1. Asking the right questions

  2. Finding a solution that will solve the problem

  3. Finding a solution that will be feasible, efficient, robust

  4. Structuring your process

  5. You will get extra points for a good estimate

Tips

  1. Ask me as many questions as you want.

  2. If you are completely lost, you can ask me to step outside the role play

  3. If you don't know something, we prefer you to be honest about it. You are not expected to know everything.

  4. The systems do not exist. Don't try to google.

Business Case

Mayfair Real Estate is a real estate agent. They sell luxury houses on behalf of their clients.

The business process of Mayfair is like this:
1. For a new property to be sold, the agent puts pictures and information of the property into RealSoft, their real estate ERP.
2. RealSoft has a feature to publish the property on the Mayfair website. To do so, the agent uploads photos to RealSoft and provides a description. Then, he clicks a button in RealSoft that will publish the content to WordPress. The listing is then visible on the Mayfair website.
3. The agent then plans one or more paid facebook campaigns. A campaign consists of a sponsored post in facebook. The post contains nice pictures, and a link to the web site listing.

The manager of Mayfair would like to analyse how impactful the facebook campaigns are. The success of a campaign is measured by the number of site views of a property on Mayfair website.

In the consulting, we came up with this dashboard:

de-wireframe.png