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A data engineer's primary responsibility is to:

  1. Transform raw data into usable formats

  2. Capture domain knowledge for business alignment

  3. Ensure data operability and organization

  4. Train data models for prediction

The correct answer is: Ensure data operability and organization

The primary responsibility of a data engineer is to ensure data operability and organization. This role focuses on creating and maintaining the architecture that allows data to be ingested, processed, stored, and accessed effectively. Data engineers design and build systems that facilitate the flow of data from various sources to repositories where data scientists and analysts can use it. They work on tasks such as establishing data pipelines, ensuring data quality, and integrating data sources. By organizing and making data operable, data engineers enable the analytical functions performed by data scientists and analysts. This foundational work is crucial, as having well-structured and easily accessible data is essential for any data-driven decision-making process or analysis. While transforming raw data into usable formats, capturing domain knowledge, and training data models are important aspects of the broader data ecosystem, a data engineer's core responsibility centers around ensuring that the data architecture functions efficiently and is well-organized to support other roles in the data science lifecycle.