Data engineer jobs: skills, pay and how to get hired
Updated 5 Nov 2026. Figures from the jobs in our search, not the whole market.
Contents
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What a data engineer does
A data engineer makes data usable. They build and run pipelines: the steps that copy data out of apps, databases and files, clean it, join it and load it into a warehouse or a data lake, where analysts, data scientists and reports use it. They make sure it arrives on time, is correct, is secure, and does not cost more than it should.
Job titles vary: Data Engineer, Big Data Engineer, Analytics Engineer (closer to the reports and the SQL models), Data Platform Engineer, ETL Developer. We count them as one role. The ladder goes up to senior and lead data engineer, data architect and head of data engineering; see the career paths.
The skills the ads ask for
We read a sample of the ads every day and count the skills they name. On a computer, hover a skill in the text to see its share; on a phone, the table has the same figures.
| Skill | Share of ads | What is expected |
|---|---|---|
| SQL | 51% | Daily work: joins, window functions, query plans, and turning a slow query into a fast one. |
| Python | 64% | Write clean, tested pipeline steps and small tools; read other people's pipelines and fix them. |
| Spark | 8% | Process large data in parallel: partitions, joins without heavy shuffles, and tuning a slow job. |
| ETL | 28% | Extract, transform, load: move data from sources into a warehouse, cleaned and ready to use. |
| AWS | 24% | The data services of AWS: storage, Glue or EMR for processing, and Redshift or Athena for queries. |
| Azure | 35% | The data services of Azure: Data Factory, Synapse or Fabric, and storage in the data lake. |
| Airflow | 11% | Schedule and order pipeline steps, with retries, alerts and backfills (re-running past days). |
| Kafka | 11% | Move events in real time: topics, partitions, consumer groups, and what happens when one fails. |
| dbt | 21% | Build tested, documented SQL models in the warehouse, with clear steps from raw data to reports. |
| Snowflake | 16% | A cloud data warehouse: loading, costs, roles and access, and keeping queries fast. |
| Docker | 8% | Package a pipeline step so it runs the same on a laptop, in testing and in production. |
| English | 62% | The working language of most data teams, and of the tools and their documentation. |
Shares of the data engineer ads we read in the last 7 days, as of 5 Nov 2026. Our ads, not the whole market.
Three groups stand out. First, the languages: SQLAsked in 51% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).Daily work: joins, window functions, query plans, and turning a slow query into a fast one. above everything, and PythonAsked in 64% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).Write clean, tested pipeline steps and small tools; read other people's pipelines and fix them. for pipeline steps. Second, the tools that move and shape data: SparkAsked in 8% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).Process large data in parallel: partitions, joins without heavy shuffles, and tuning a slow job. for large data, AirflowAsked in 11% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).Schedule and order pipeline steps, with retries, alerts and backfills (re-running past days). to run the steps in order, KafkaAsked in 11% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).Move events in real time: topics, partitions, consumer groups, and what happens when one fails. for real-time events, and dbtAsked in 21% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).Build tested, documented SQL models in the warehouse, with clear steps from raw data to reports. for tested SQL models. Third, a cloud: AWSAsked in 24% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).The data services of AWS: storage, Glue or EMR for processing, and Redshift or Athena for queries., AzureAsked in 35% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).The data services of Azure: Data Factory, Synapse or Fabric, and storage in the data lake. or Google CloudAsked in 10% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).The data services of Google Cloud: BigQuery, Dataflow and Pub/Sub., often with a warehouse such as SnowflakeAsked in 16% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).A cloud data warehouse: loading, costs, roles and access, and keeping queries fast..
Many ads also name ETLAsked in 28% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).Extract, transform, load: move data from sources into a warehouse, cleaned and ready to use. (extract, transform, load: the classic way of moving data), DockerAsked in 8% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).Package a pipeline step so it runs the same on a laptop, in testing and in production. and CI/CDAsked in 29% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).Test and release pipelines automatically, so a change reaches production safely. (automatic testing and release). Banks and large companies still name HadoopAsked in 4% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).The older big data platform; still found at banks and telecoms, mostly being moved to the cloud. and ScalaAsked in 3% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).Mostly with Spark at banks and older platforms; Python is now asked for more often., usually for platforms being moved to the cloud.
Where the jobs are, country by country
Each country below has its own figures: which cities have the most jobs in our list, whether the number is going up or down, how often ads offer remote or hybrid work, and pay ranges from published research, in the local currency.
Germany
17% of the ads offer hybrid work, and 21% are fully remote.
Pay (Base salary)
- Entry level: €48,000 to €60,000 a year
- Mid-level: €60,000 to €78,000 a year
- Senior: €75,000 to €100,000 a year
Total pay: with bonus, Payscale puts data engineer pay at about €42,000 to €83,000 a year; bonuses are mostly small.
Stuttgart pays the most of the large cities, then Munich and Frankfurt (Indeed).
Sources: Indeed (Oct 2026), Payscale (Jul 2026), StepStone (2026).
Pay researched on 27 Oct 2026.
Language: many ads in Germany ask for GermanAsked in 66% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).Named in many ads in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, often for work with business departments., because data engineers work closely with business departments. International teams often work in EnglishAsked in 62% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).The working language of most data teams, and of the tools and their documentation..
Sectors: car makers, industry, insurers and retail run large data platforms, often on AzureAsked in 35% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).The data services of Azure: Data Factory, Synapse or Fabric, and storage in the data lake. or SAPAsked in 10% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).Many company data platforms load finance, sales and production data out of SAP systems. data, as well as start-ups in the big cities.
Law (EU): GDPR (EU) decides how personal data may be stored, kept and deleted; data engineers build those rules into the pipelines.
Job figures as of 5 Nov 2026.
United States
12% of the ads offer hybrid work, and 46% are fully remote.
99% of the ads that say are full-time.
Pay (Base salary)
- Entry level: $90,000 to $115,000 a year
- Mid-level: $115,000 to $150,000 a year
- Senior: $145,000 to $195,000 a year
Total pay: Built In's respondents report about $24,000 a year in extra cash on top of base; Payscale puts total pay, with bonus, at about $71,000 to $151,000.
Charlotte, Seattle and San Jose pay the most (Indeed).
Sources: Indeed (Oct 2026), Built In (2026), Payscale (Jul 2026), Payscale: senior (Sep 2026), Robert Half 2027 Salary Guide (a projection).
Pay researched on 27 Oct 2026.
Pay: big tech companies pay far above the ranges below once stock is counted, and data engineers in finance often get a yearly bonus.
Job figures as of 5 Nov 2026.
United Kingdom
9% of the ads offer hybrid work, and 39% are fully remote.
Pay (Base salary)
- Entry level: £35,000 to £50,000 a year
- Mid-level: £50,000 to £75,000 a year
- Senior: £65,000 to £95,000 a year
Total pay: the sources give base salary; bonuses are not separated.
London pays about a seventh more than the UK as a whole (ITJobsWatch).
Sources: ITJobsWatch (Oct 2026), ITJobsWatch: senior (Oct 2026), Indeed (Oct 2026).
Pay researched on 27 Oct 2026.
Sectors: London has many data roles in finance and fintech; the public sector and retail hire data engineers across the country.
Job figures as of 5 Nov 2026.
Switzerland
5% of the ads offer hybrid work, and 57% are fully remote.
Pay (Base salary)
- Entry level: CHF 80,000 to CHF 100,000 a year
- Mid-level: CHF 100,000 to CHF 125,000 a year
- Senior: CHF 120,000 to CHF 155,000 a year
Total pay: Payscale gives bonuses of about CHF 2,000 to CHF 30,000 a year, and total pay up to about CHF 151,000.
The Zurich area pays above the Swiss average (Indeed).
Sources: Indeed (Oct 2026), Payscale (Dec 2025), Payscale: senior (Feb 2025).
Pay researched on 27 Oct 2026.
Sector: banks, insurers and pharma hire many data engineers; ads often ask for German or French as well as English.
Job figures as of 5 Nov 2026.
India
2% of the ads offer hybrid work, and 50% are fully remote.
Pay (Base salary)
- Entry level: ₹4.5 lakh to ₹8 lakh a year
- Mid-level: ₹8 lakh to ₹16 lakh a year
- Senior: ₹15 lakh to ₹35 lakh a year
Total pay: with bonus, Payscale puts data engineer pay at about ₹4.35 lakh to ₹20 lakh a year, and senior data engineers at about ₹10 lakh to ₹40 lakh.
Gurgaon, Bengaluru and Mumbai pay above the national average (Indeed).
Sources: Indeed (Oct 2026), Payscale (Oct 2026), Payscale: senior (Aug 2026).
Pay researched on 27 Oct 2026.
Employers: IT services firms, product companies and global capability centres (the in-house tech centres of foreign companies) hire most data engineers; pay is highest at product companies.
Job figures as of 5 Nov 2026.
Your CV for a data engineer job
A data engineer CV is read by two readers: the hiring software, which looks for the words of the ad, and a lead engineer, who looks for proof that your pipelines ran reliably at a real size. Write for both.
Use the keywords the ads use
- Name the tools the way the ad names them: "Apache Spark", "Airflow", "dbt", "Snowflake", "Azure Data Factory". The skills table above shows which keywords the ads use most.
- Put the core skills in a short line near the top: SQLAsked in 51% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).Daily work: joins, window functions, query plans, and turning a slow query into a fast one., PythonAsked in 64% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).Write clean, tested pipeline steps and small tools; read other people's pipelines and fix them., your processing tool such as SparkAsked in 8% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).Process large data in parallel: partitions, joins without heavy shuffles, and tuning a slow job., your orchestrator such as AirflowAsked in 11% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).Schedule and order pipeline steps, with retries, alerts and backfills (re-running past days)., your cloud and your warehouse.
- Add the cloud certificate if the ads in your market ask for one, such as an AWS certificateAsked in 1% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).An AWS data or solutions certificate is named in some ads, mostly at consultancies. or an Azure certificateAn Azure data engineer certificate is named in some ads, mostly at Microsoft-heavy companies..
- Only list what you can talk about for ten minutes. Every word on the CV is a question in the interview.
Prove each skill
A skill in a list proves nothing. A line under a job proves it: what the pipeline did, how much data, and one result in numbers, such as time saved, cost cut, failures fewer, or data that arrives sooner.
| Skill | Weak line | Strong line, with proof |
|---|---|---|
| Spark | Experience with Spark. | Rewrote the daily sales job in Spark with better partitioning; run time down from 3 hours to 25 minutes. |
| Airflow | Built pipelines with Airflow. | Moved 40 cron jobs into Airflow with retries and alerts; failed nights fell from weekly to once a quarter. |
| dbtAsked in 21% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).Build tested, documented SQL models in the warehouse, with clear steps from raw data to reports. and SQL | Strong SQL skills. | Built 60 tested dbt models for finance; month-end figures ready on day 1 instead of day 4. |
| KafkaAsked in 11% of data engineer ads (as of 5 Nov 2026).Move events in real time: topics, partitions, consumer groups, and what happens when one fails. | Real-time data processing. | Built a Kafka stream for orders; stock levels in the shop update in seconds instead of hourly. |
| Cost | Cloud data platform. | Cut the warehouse bill by 35% by clustering large tables and stopping unused jobs. |
Never claim what you did not do. If you were one of several people, say what was yours: "I built the ingestion", "I designed the data model".
How we read our data
- The jobs: the data engineer jobs in our job search, matched the same way the search matches them. Our list is not the whole market, so we give shares and rankings, never counts.
- The skills: we read a sample of the ads every day and count the skills in them with a fixed word list. We keep only the counts, never the ad text.
- Pay: from published salary research, with each source and its date, as a range from entry level to senior. It is not worked out from our ads.
- Dates: every figure is worked out again each day, and shows the day it was worked out.
Frequently asked questions
- What does a data engineer do?
- Builds and runs the pipelines that move data from apps and databases into a warehouse or data lake, cleaned, on time and ready for reports, analysis and machine learning.
- What is the difference between a data engineer and a data scientist?
- The data engineer makes the data reliable and available; the data scientist uses it to build models and answer questions. Many teams need both.
- Which skills matter most?
- SQL and Python lead in the ads, then a cloud, a processing tool such as Spark, an orchestrator such as Airflow, and a warehouse.
- Do I need a computer science degree?
- It helps, but many data engineers come from analysis, software or IT. Pipelines you built and ran count for more.
- What should a data engineer CV show first?
- Two or three pipelines or platforms you built, each with the size of the data and a result in numbers. Then a short skills line in the words of the ads.
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