Start Here & Roadmap
Before you learn anything technical, get the map. This short course explains what a Data Platform Engineer actually does, lays out the eight-course curriculum and how the pieces ladder together, gives you a realistic six-month schedule, and shows you how to study so the effort sticks. Start here — it will save you weeks.
The one promise of this curriculum
If you can write a SELECT with a JOIN and a small Python script, you have enough to begin. By the end you will have built and operated a real (if small) data platform, and the senior Data Platform Systems Design guide will read like a colleague talking, not a foreign language.
Chapters
00
Start Here
Who this is for, what you'll be able to do at the end, the prerequisite self-check, and how to read the curriculum. Read first.
01
What a Data Platform Engineer Is
The role in plain language — the day-to-day, what you own, and how DPE relates to data engineer, analytics engineer, ML engineer, and data architect.
02
The Curriculum Map
All eight courses, what each teaches, and how foundations ladder up through the craft and tooling to the capstone build and the senior systems-design reading.
03
The Six-Month Schedule
A realistic part-time plan with weekly time estimates and milestones — plus faster and slower variants, and how to pace yourself without burning out.
04
How to Use This Curriculum
How to actually learn this — checkpoints and exercises, the companion repo, learning in public, spaced practice, and what to do when you get stuck.
The bigger path
This course is the on-ramp. The full journey, course by course:
YOU ARE HERE
│
┌────▼─────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐
│ 1 Roadmap │──▶│ 2 Orientation & │──▶│ 3 Foundations │
│ (this course) │ │ Setup (hands-on)│ │ (degree core) │
└──────────────────┘ └──────────────────┘ └─────────┬────────┘
│
┌──────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐ ┌─────────▼────────┐
│ 6 Capstone Labs │◀──│ 5 Tooling & │◀──│ 4 The DE Craft │
│ build mini- │ │ Modern Stack │ │ (modeling, dbt,│
│ GridDP │ │ │ │ streaming…) │
└─────────┬────────┘ └──────────────────┘ └──────────────────┘
│
┌─────────▼────────┐ ┌──────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 7 Career & │──▶│ SENIOR READING (different topic): │
│ Getting the Job │ │ Data Platform Systems Design — GPU Mkt │
└──────────────────┘ └──────────────────────────────────────────┘
Glossary & Cheat Sheets (Course 8) — keep open the whole way
Courses 3–8 are being built out; chapter 02 describes each one in detail.