AWS DEA-C01 Data Engineer Exam Guide Skills, Overview, and Ideal Candidate Profi

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Exam Description / Overview

The AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate (DEA‑C01) is an associate-level certification offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It validates a candidate’s ability to design, implement, and maintain scalable and cost-efficient data pipelines on AWS.

Key competencies tested in the exam include:

• Ingesting and transforming data using programming paradigms and AWS services.
• Designing and managing data stores, including schema design and data lifecycle.
• Monitoring, troubleshooting, and operating data pipelines to ensure data quality.
• Implementing security, governance, encryption, and logging for data workflows.
  
  

Exam Format & Logistics:

• Duration: 130 minutes
• Number of Questions: 65 (multiple choice or multiple response)
• Passing Score: 720 (on a scaled score of 100–1000)
• Languages: English, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese
• Cost: $150 USD
  
  

Ideal For

The DEA‑C01 certification is ideal for:

• Data Engineers designing and operating data processing systems on AWS.
• Cloud Professionals who want to specialize in data pipelines and big data workflows.
• Data Architects responsible for modeling, storing, and governing data at scale.
• Engineers with 2–3 years of experience in data engineering and hands-on AWS usage.
• Technical Team Leads / DevOps Engineers ensuring data solutions are efficient, secure, and compliant.
  
  

Recommended Experience:

• Knowledge of data ingestion, transformation (ETL), and orchestration.
• Familiarity with AWS services such as Glue, Kinesis, S3, Redshift, DynamoDB, Lambda, etc.
• Understanding of programming concepts and version control.
• Basic knowledge of networking, storage, compute, and data governance/security.