Data Engineering & Systems Mastery:
18-Month Learning Roadmap
This roadmap is designed to transition from AWS cloud foundations to high-level distributed
systems and MLOps, maintaining a consistent daily habit of logic and coding.
Phase Focus Domain Key Curriculum &
Milestones
● AWS Certified Data
Phase 1: The Cloud AWS Data Engineering & Engineer (DEA-
Foundation (Months 1-3) Networking C01): Complete core
video curriculum
(Videos 1-307).
● Networking: Master
OSI Model,
Subnetting, and VPC
peering.
● DSA: Striver’s A2Z
Sheet - Step 1
(Basics) & Step 2
(Sorting).
● Advanced Python:
Phase 2: Data Python Automation & Mastery of Boto3,
Orchestration (Months 4-6) Airflow FastAPI, and
Pydantic.
● Workflow
Orchestration:
Deploying complex
DAGs in Apache
Airflow.
● DSA: Step 3 (Arrays)
& Step 4 (Binary
Search).
● PySpark Deep Dive:
Phase 3: Big Data Apache Spark & Distributed RDDs, DataFrames,
Processing (Months 7-9) Compute and Spark
Optimization
techniques.
● Data Modeling: Star
Schema vs.
Phase Focus Domain Key Curriculum &
Milestones
Snowflake and SCD
(Slowly Changing
Dimensions).
● DSA: Step 5 (Strings)
& Step 6 (Linked
Lists).
● KCNA/K8s:
Phase 4: Cloud-Native Kubernetes & Real-time Mastering Pods,
Ops (Months 10-12) Streams Services, Helm, and
K8s networking.
● Kafka: Producers,
Consumers, and
Stream Processing.
● DSA: Step 7
(Recursion) & Step 8
(Bit Manipulation).
● MIT 6.824:
Phase 5: Systems Distributed Systems & Go Implementing Raft
Mastery (Months 13-15) consensus and
MapReduce in Go.
● Advanced Systems:
Database internals,
Consistency models,
and CAP theorem.
● DSA: Step 13 (Binary
Trees) & Step 14
(BST).
● Vector DBs:
Phase 6: The AI Frontier MLOps & Vector Deploying
(Months 16-18) Infrastructure Milvus/ChromaDB for
RAG applications.
● MLOps: Building
end-to-end training
and inference
pipelines.
● DSA: Step 15
(Graphs) & Final
Interview Prep.
Daily Execution Habits
● Morning (10:30-13:30): Deep Learning (AWS/System Design).
● Night (21:30-23:30): Coding Practice (DSA/Python Scripts).