AssociateAWS

AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate — Study Guide & Exam Overview

Data engineers are among the highest-paid cloud professionals. This certification validates your ability to design and manage the data infrastructure that powers analytics and ML — a skillset in high demand across fintech, healthcare, and e-commerce.

Duration

130 min

Passing Score

720 / 1000 points

Level

Associate

Provider

AWS

What This Certification Covers

  • Designing and building data pipelines using Kinesis, Glue, and Lambda
  • Data storage strategies: S3, Redshift, DynamoDB, RDS, and Aurora
  • Streaming vs. batch processing trade-offs with Kinesis Data Streams and Firehose
  • Data governance with AWS Lake Formation: fine-grained access control and data catalogs
  • Monitoring and optimizing data workloads using CloudWatch and AWS Glue DataBrew

Exam Domain Breakdown

  • Data Ingestion & Transformation (34%)
  • Data Store Management (26%)
  • Data Operations & Support (22%)
  • Data Security & Governance (18%)

Exam Format

65 multiple-choice and multiple-response questions, 130 minutes, scored 100–1000 with passing score of 720

Study Tips to Pass Data Engineer

  1. 1Understand the end-to-end data lifecycle: ingestion → transformation → storage → analysis → governance
  2. 2Study Kinesis thoroughly: Data Streams, Firehose, Data Analytics, and MSK (Managed Kafka)
  3. 3Know when to use Glue ETL, Glue DataBrew, EMR, or native SQL in Redshift/Athena
  4. 4Master Lake Formation permissions — they override IAM and S3 bucket policies
  5. 5Review the AWS Data Analytics Specialty whitepaper for architecture patterns still tested on this exam

Ready to test your knowledge? Take a free timed mock exam below.

Official Data Engineer exam page