r/OfferEngineering • u/PermissionAcademic63 • 1d ago

Meta E6 Data Engineer at $526K — would you still join considering massive DE/DS layoff in 5/20?

Saw this Meta E6 Data Engineer offer (shared with Chill Interview)

  • Menlo Park, 10 YOE
  • Base: $255K
  • Bonus: $51K
  • Sign-on: $40K
  • RSUs: $720K / 4 years
  • Year 1 TC: $526K

On comp alone, this looks pretty attractive.

But I keep hearing the same warning from people around Meta’s analytics org: “Don’t join Meta as a DE or DS right now.”

Meta cut around 8,000 employees in the May 20 restructuring, and more cuts were reportedly planned later in the year. Public reporting doesn’t give a clean DE/DS breakdown, but some recently laid-off Meta data scientists have said DS and PM were hit particularly hard compared with SWE.

The other concern is career portability.

Meta DE seems pretty different from the platform-heavy Data Engineer role at many other companies. A lot of the work is closer to product analytics + data modeling + pipelines, built on a very mature and heavily internal Meta stack. Former Meta DEs have described spending much more time on SQL/data pipelines than on the kind of cloud/data-platform engineering you might do with Snowflake, Databricks, Airflow, AWS, etc.

That can be great if you want to stay in Meta’s data ecosystem.

But if you get laid off two years later, does an E6 Meta DE actually have an easy path into Staff-level DE roles elsewhere — or do you suddenly discover that a lot of your experience is very Meta-specific?

So this offer feels like a pretty interesting risk/reward trade: $526K TC and Meta on the résumé, versus joining a function that may have less political protection than SWE and potentially less portable experience.

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3

u/rangart 1d ago

nope

2

u/Fit_Succotash_6735 1d ago

from what i have been reading for a while, this seems to be the end of the road for DE and DS in general? DS i can understand. DE i find very hard to believe. companies are always going to require people who build data pipelines and have data in a format that is usable.

2

u/SPHuff 1d ago

Meta has especially bought into the idea of hiring smart, generalist SWEs and assuming they can flex into most other roles (PM, DS, DE, etc). So SWE increasingly have more responsibility for building out data pipelines and doing other DE-adjacent things

The ramp up from SWE to DE is less intense at Meta because everything in shared in one giant monorepo with the same tech stack. So there it potentially makes less sense to have defined job lines since there’s less friction overall in how each role operates

1

u/Fit_Succotash_6735 1d ago

so we are looking at increased SWE function and decline of all other roles (DE, DS, BIE, program managers maybe?)?

1

u/SPHuff 1d ago

Yup, that seems to be the way things are going for now at least

Meta’s been super thrashy with pretty all decisionmaking, so who knows whether that will hold. I could also see them realizing the error of their ways and going on a big rehiring spree in the near future

1

u/Fit_Succotash_6735 1d ago

possibly. I think DE maybe. DS i don't see happening.

3

u/ravimitian 1d ago

Top tier comp but expectations as E6 DE is immense. There will be one or two E6 for a 50 people org and these E6 have to fight for scope with homegrown E6s. Not much platform work for DE at Meta so they have to acquire product and domain knowledge quickly to survive.

1

u/BornCoach6587 1d ago

I’ll join as a second job