What's on the Data Engineer exam

The AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate (DEA-C01) validates your ability to implement and manage data pipelines on AWS, and to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize their cost and performance in line with best practices. The target candidate has roughly 2–3 years of data engineering experience plus 1–2 years of hands-on experience with AWS services.

Domains covered

The exam is organized into weighted domains. The percentages indicate roughly how much of the exam each domain represents, which is a useful guide for allocating study time.

Data Ingestion and Transformation 34%

Ingesting data from varied sources, transforming and processing it, orchestrating data pipelines, and applying programming concepts — using services such as AWS Glue, Amazon EMR, and Amazon Kinesis.

Data Store Management 26%

Choosing the right data store, designing data models, cataloguing schemas, and managing data lifecycles across services like Amazon S3, Redshift, and DynamoDB.

Data Operations and Support 22%

Operationalizing, maintaining, and monitoring data pipelines, analyzing data, and ensuring data quality with services such as Amazon Athena and CloudWatch.

Data Security and Governance 18%

Applying authentication, authorization, encryption, privacy, and governance, and enabling logging — using services like AWS Lake Formation, IAM, and Amazon Macie.

How to prepare

The exam is applied and service-heavy: expect scenarios that ask you to choose and combine the right AWS data services for ingestion, storage, and governance. Hands-on familiarity with Glue, Athena, S3, Redshift, and Lake Formation matters. As with other AWS exams, 50 of the 65 questions are scored and 15 are unscored trial questions. Timed practice papers help confirm your depth across all four domains.

Exam formats and passing scores are updated periodically by AWS. Always confirm the current details on the official AWS certification page before booking your exam.