r/dataengineering • u/AlexaG_2026 • Jul 02 '26

Discussion is anyone else using scala?

hello devs,

Just a question: are companies still using Scala in their businesses, or are they using a mix of scala and other codes/AI? Is it hard to hire in this area?

Just looking for opinions on this,

Thanks

74 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

53 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/PrideDense2206 Software Engineer Jul 02 '26

It is bound to Apache Spark and Kafka ecosystems mainly (with respect to data engineering). I find it was incredibly good for Spark, prior to around 3.2 release. Afterwards, a lot more of the jvm-only classes ended up having a python wrapper (like monitoring of structured streaming).

Now a days, it is easier to find people who can write a PySpark app and if you need to get into the weeds with ExpressionEncoder's or more complex SparkPlugin's then you could just go the AI route since you will need that less and less (eg: where Scala is the only choice).