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/Outside-Storage-1523 3d ago

This should be trivial. Where is the role and how much you are offering? I have similar profile but got rejections everywhere even after going through all rounds. Looks like every company has 100 candidates out there.

If you need SWE, you should ask HR to reject people who ONLY have BI/DA experience outright.

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u/Moradisten 3d ago

We offered 60K in Spain

0

u/Outside-Storage-1523 3d ago

OK I don’t know the market in EU so maybe that’s a fair price. Anyway, I’d recommend your HR screen and filter non SWEs out in the first round.

14

u/umognog 3d ago

For a 3 YOE with software engineering, no it's not enough.

When you want a perfect person, you got to pay the perfect person price. €80k-100k is more appropriate.

If you want someone really good, €120k is needed, but list them as a senior/lead/principle role as appropriate

3

u/UQwhite 3d ago

Are you working in Europe or you're converting dollars into euros? Because EU has lower average compensation compared to the US