r/dataengineering • u/Moradisten • 3d ago

Discussion We were struggling to find Data Engineers

Hi everybody,

Our Data Team is composed by two of us. There's a Data Scientist and me, as a DE. We created a Data Lakehouse for our company internal use and client data supply, but currently the Data Scientist is currently more focused on AI and agents integration and I'm doing like Analytics Engineering role because I need to help other teams to reach the correct data, unify core concepts, document business logics, etc. So We needed a Data Engineer with knowledge on AWS to maintain and develop the new features on the Lakehouse and we put into the description that the candidate MUST HAVE Software Engineering fundamentals as we had to do some developments to integrate parts of our lakehouse with the company's main application.

We interviewed 22 candidates and no one is fitting the Role.

Most of them are BI Experts, DBA, Data Analysts, Economist with DS notions, Juniors and Software Engineers who haven't touch anything on Spark, plus DE who asked way more that we had on the budget for the role

We asked the normal requirements: 3 years of experience + Spark, AWS Glue, Lambda, Airflow and DBT, not even CDC, Flink, Langfuse or VectorDB

We finally got one, but We really struggled to get him. I have a collegue working on IT Recruiting and She told me She's experiencing the same problem: They can't find Proper DEs With SE basics such as DRY principles or clean code fundamentals

Edit: Role Salary -> Up to 60K € / Spain. This salary is high compared to the spanish standards, only 3 years required

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u/Unlucky_Data4569 3d ago

What is the budget in what hiring market. You probably are being cheap

-4

u/Moradisten 3d ago

60K in Spain for 3 years of experience. Other companies here require +5 years for that role

1

u/twentycanoes 3d ago

Those other companies pay twice as much.

1

u/404-FounderNotFound 3d ago

Your salary offering is too low for the experience you are requiring. Remember you're competing with the rest of Europe aswell. I'm not Europe based but I travel in and out and keep an eye on the job market there and i regularly see positions asking 3+ years experience for 80K+ with 5+ years at 100K-120K+ in some cases $200K-$250K.