Consider hiring Big Data developers? It comes as no surprise as IDC forecasts that worldwide revenues for big data and business analytics will go up to more than $203 billion in 2020, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.7%.

The Shortage of Big Data Engineers is prompted by the Business Value of Data Analytics

Big Data Analytics is used to streamline business processes across such domains as Media and Entertainment, Finance, Government, Retail, Healthcare, Energy, Aviation, and many more. It enables you to leverage real-time data and make informed proactive decisions. Here are some of the areas Big Data analytics can help you to enhance:

• customer segmentation, managing customer relationship, and offering more customer-centric products;

• managing stocks and predicting needs in products;

• optimizing resource utilization and reducing costs;

• fraud detection;

• identifying and removing performance bottlenecks proactively;

As a result, by 2020 the number of Data Science and Analytics job listings is estimated to grow by nearly 364,000 openings to approximately 2,720,000.

Thus, most companies that are looking for qualified Big Data developers with the suitable domain expertise stumble upon an overwhelming problem – the shortage of talent and high salaries of the required specialists.

According to Glassdoor, an average salary of a senior big data developer in the US exceeds $123,000 annually.

Big Data developers

Big Data engineering is a foundation of any Big Data analytics and Data Science, whether all the company needs is just collecting the data from different sources, aggregating it and turning into lucid visualization, or using complex data science or machine learning algorithms. Thus if you want big data analytics, you may not need a Data Scientist or a ML engineer, but you will most probably need a Big Data engineer. Thus Big Data engineers are even in more demand and harder to find than Data scientists or other Data experts.

In a blog post by The Eckerson Group, there is a reference that "Michelle Goetz of Forrester Research reported finding twelve times as many unfilled data engineering jobs as data science jobs."

Ukraine as one of top destinations for hiring Big Data developers

As a result of the soaring demand for engineering talent, many businesses are looking for big data developers in Eastern Europe and Asia.

Big Data community in Ukraine

And they do it for good reason. For example, Ukraine, is home to 1,000+ software development providers and 160,000+ software engineers. According to Linkedin, the number of Big Data Developers in Ukraine amounts to over 1,400 big data and Hadoop developers.

Ukraine hosts many Big Data conferences including international conferences such as AI Ukraine Conference, AI & Big Data Day, JEEConf, etc. Local communities also organize regular meetups and workshops for big data and analytics experts.

Big Data education in Ukraine

Ukraine has a strong STEM-based educational tradition. In addition, Ukrainian Catholic University offers a Master’s program in Computer Science with specialization in Data Science . The Master’s Program in Computer Science/Data Science gives qualitative knowledge and skills in programming, data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, big data system architecture, product development as well as offers leadership and self-development courses for its students.

Big Data expertise in Ukraine

Also, Ukraine is home to top 41 big data analytics companies according to Clutch. The companies include N-iX, CoreValue, DataRoot Lab, SoftServe, and more.

For example, N-iX has helped a US-based company, Gogo, to undergo a complete transition of their multiple solutions to a unified cloud-based data platform.

Gogo is one of the leaders in in-flight connectivity and wireless entertainment services for commercial and business fleets around the world.

We’ve helped the client to optimize operations, completely rebuilt the solution using open-source technologies, such as Spark, streamlined the system of prediction. Our team built a solution to analyze and spot reasons for ill-performance and equipment failures, reducing the number of no-fault-founds by 8 times.

Tips companies must follow when hiring Big Data developers

Before hiring Big Data developers, clients need to know what they are going to do with the data. For instance, it makes no sense to engage Big Data developers to process Excel files, and it doesn’t make sense to hire SQL developers for Big Data projects. You need to choose the right experts for the right tasks.

For real Big Data projects, you need very experienced specialists both proficient in Big Data tech stack and with very strong coding skills (Scala, Python).

Tech stack Big Data developers need to be expert in

Hadoop ecosystem and Apache Spark.They allow large data storing and processing by distributing the computation on several nodes.

SQL/NoSQL databases.

Such big data tools as Pig, RedShift, Hive, Athena for quering data.

Also, big data engineers need to know how to maintain old MapReduce Java code and rewrite it using a more recent Spark technology.

From the point of view of programming, the focus is on Scala, Python and Java.

Wrap-up

Companies that are looking to engage Big Data engineers often find it more sensible to hire them in nearshore or offshore destinations. Many businesses outsource to countries of Eastern Europe, including Ukraine. The country provides a rich talent pool of software engineers and an attractive price-to-quality ratio. However, to find a reliable partner for your Big Data endeavor, choose the company that has solid track record and proven expertise in such technology stack as Hadoop, Spark, AWS, Cloudera, Pig, Hive, and more.