Thought Leadership

Data Reliability Engineering: What We're Seeing

At Metaphor, we're noticing an important trend: the emergence of the Data Reliability Engineer (DRE) role.

Head of Product
1
 min. read
April 4, 2024
Data Reliability Engineering: What We're Seeing

At Metaphor, we're noticing an important trend: the emergence of the Data Reliability Engineer (DRE) role. According to a 451 Research article, this role is becoming crucial in ensuring data delivery is reliable across organizations.

What is a DRE?

The demand for data engineers is high, and their work is critical. However, the growing number of data consumers and the complexity of data sources can overwhelm data engineers, making data reliability a bottleneck. Enter the Data Reliability Engineer.

Where data engineers ensure the availability and management of data, DREs take this a step further by focusing on the reliability of this data. They integrate tools and practices from site reliability engineering and DevOps to maintain high-quality data delivery.

What makes DRE particularly interesting is its holistic approach; blending culture, process, and tech. It requires a shift in perspective, treating data reliability as an iterative engineering challenge rather than a series of ad hoc projects.

Our Take

DRE methodologies represent a strategic investment in the foundation of data-driven decision-making, ensuring that data flows with integrity and purpose.

At Metaphor, we understand this deeply. Our approach mirrors the DRE's ethos, emphasizing collaborative data governance and leveraging data mesh architectures to foster a culture where data reliability is paramount.

In summary, the DRE role is key to managing the complexity of today's data landscape. It ensures that data is available and reliable, supporting the needs of data-driven organizations.

About Metaphor

The Metaphor Metadata Platform represents the next evolution of the Data Catalog - it combines best in class Technical Metadata (learnt from building DataHub at LinkedIn) with Behavioral and Social Metadata. It supercharges an organization’s ability to democratize data with state of the art capabilities for Data Governance, Data Literacy and Data Enablement, and provides an extremely intuitive user interface that turns even the most non-technical user into a fan of the catalog. See Metaphor in action today!