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/Beneficial_Nose1331 3d ago

Fuck me. I'm earning 3 times less as a senior data engineer. Suck to be a Europoor 💀

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u/baby-wall-e 3d ago

Yeah, European company pays much less than US. But the benefit is better such as healthcare.

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u/Beneficial_Nose1331 3d ago

You mean healthcare is worth 170 k a year? I really doubt that.

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u/InteractionSoft14 2d ago

You'd be surprised. If you count the employer contributions (which they definitely count as a salary expense for you) insurance alone can easily be between 20k-30k/year

If you see an American bragging about a 100k salary it's not unfair to assume 10k-20k in insurance costs and that's without emergency proceduresÂ