A candidate for the Azure Data Engineer Associate certification should have subject matter expertise integrating, transforming, and consolidating data from various structured and unstructured data systems into structures that are suitable for building analytics solutions.

Responsibilities for this role include helping stakeholders understand the data through exploration, building and maintaining secure and compliant data processing pipelines by using different tools and techniques. This professional uses various Azure data services and languages to store and produce cleansed and enhanced datasets for analysis.

An Azure data engineer also helps ensure that data pipelines and data stores are high-performing, efficient, organized, and reliable, given a specific set of business requirements and constraints. This professional deals with unanticipated issues swiftly and minimizes data loss. An Azure data engineer also designs, implements, monitors, and optimizes data platforms to meet the data pipeline needs.

A candidate for this certification must have solid knowledge of data processing languages, such as SQL, Python, or Scala, and they need to understand parallel processing and data architecture patterns.