Abstract: Data engineering refers to the set of activities related to preparing and managing data for analytical workloads, and it encompasses a wide range of tasks performed on data at different stages of the analytics life cycle—from ingestion and integration to feature engineering and metadata management. A data engineering pipeline connects various e-commerce data sources by combining data from multiple operational silos (product catalog, customer accounts, shopping carts, transaction records, shipping and delivery, payments, etc.) in order to support the development of artificial intelligence models used for personalized website experiences, recommendation engines, dynamic pricing strategies, and demand forecasting. Nowadays, the volume of consumed data and the highly dynamic nature of the business logic being implemented in the underlying model have reached a point where data engineering pipelines need to be automated, enabling the data operations teams to support the business more efficiently.
Automation at scale is an ambitious goal that requires specialized frameworks and technologies across different areas of data engineering. These areas are outlined through recurring architectural patterns, and each pattern is built by assembling the most suitable services and tools on the market from the cloud providers that best match the organization’s business requirements in order to enable the core automation processes. Reusable building blocks are introduced for key activities such as cloud-native data platforms, data orchestration and workflow automation, automated schema discovery and adaptation, and anomaly detection and data quality alerting. Even though these solutions are presented in the context of personalized experiences and recommendation engines—typical workloads of any large e-commerce organization—they cover only part of the actual automation. The presented approaches can be applied to any AI/ML problem requiring a data plane—such as dynamic pricing and demand forecasting—with the required effort range for implementation.

Keywords: Data Engineering, Automation, AI, E-Commerce, Personalization,Automated Data Pipelines,AI-Driven ETL / ELT,Real-Time Data Processing,E-Commerce Data Integration,Data Quality Monitoring,Intelligent Data Orchestration,Predictive Data Validation,Customer Behavior Analytics,Scalable Cloud Data Warehousing,Anomaly Detection in Data Streams.

Downloads: | DOI: 10.17148/IJIREEICE.2023.111217