Data Science
Career Paths
Overview & Comparison
The world produces

2,500,000,000,

000,000,000+
bytes of data every day, that’s equal to

10 million
Blu-Ray disks stacked the height of 

4 Eiffel Towers.
Source: http://www.vcloudnews.com/every-day-big-data-
statistics-2-5-quintillion-bytes-of-data-created-daily/
A Data Scientist solves
problems with large amounts of
data.
Example: Analyze tweets to figure out
whether or not a tweet sent to a
company is positive or negative.
The US alone will face a shortage of 

150,000+
data analysts and an additional 

1.5 million
data-savvy managers
What makes
Springboard unique?3 common roles in
Data Science
Data
Scientist
Data
Engineer
Data
Analyst
Data Scientist
Also called Statisticians, Data Managers
A Data Scientist will be able to take data
science projects from end to end.
They can help store large amounts of data,
create predictive modeling processes and
tell stories about the findings
Data Scientist
Average salary
$USD

115,000
Data Scientist
Skills needed
Mathematics,
Programming,
Communication
Tools used
SQL,
Python, 

R
Data Engineer
Also called Data Architects
Data Engineers are versatile generalists
who create data pipelines to help process
large amounts of data. 



They typically focus on coding, cleaning up
data sets, and implementing requests that
come from Data Scientists.
Data Engineer
Average salary
$USD

100,000
Data Engineer
Skills needed
Programming,
Mathematics, 

Big Data
Tools used
Hadoop,
NoSQL,
Python
Data Analyst
Also called Business Analysts
A Data Analyst helps people from across
the company understand data insights
they’ve unearthed.
Data Analyst
Average salary
$USD

65,000
Data Analyst
Skills needed
Statistics,
Communication,
Business
Knowledge
Tools used
Excel,
Tableau,
SQL
How do the roles connect?
Inspired by Drew Conway
Typical Majors
Mathematics
Economics
Computer
Science
Engineering
Physics
Statistics
Business
~215,000
Open job positions
Data from Indeed.com, January 2017
Top 3 hiring locations

in the U.S.
San Francisco New York Seattle
What makes
Springboard unique?Data Science Profiles
DJ Patil

Data Scientist
As the former Chief Data Scientist of the United
States Office of Science and Technology Policy, DJ
is the perfect prototype of the Data Scientist. 
Doug Cutting,
Data Engineer
The creator of Hadoop and a member of Apache’s Board of
Directors is a model of the data engineer who builds tools to
process big data.
Roger Huang,
Data Analyst
The humble author of this piece, while nowhere near
as talented as the two individuals referenced above,
did serve a brief stint as a data analyst for a
pharmaceutical company. 
Data science is a new and exciting field filled
with lucrative career paths.
Curious to learn more? 

Check out Data Science Career
Track!
Ready for the next step?
Read more at
www.springboard.com/blog/data-science-career-paths-
different-roles-industry
www.springboard.com

Different Career Paths in Data Science