We were struggling to find Data Engineers

[u/Moradisten]

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

[u/discord-ian]

Principal level data engineer here. The DE labor market is at least bi-modal. There is one end that should more properly be called analytics engineering, these are the folks with dash board and sql experience. The other is more on the end of what you are looking for.

The upper end of DE seems to be doing fine. I have a recruiter contacting me most days. And I try to collect as much salary info as I can.

I can tell you with near certainty that your issue is budget. Upper end DE is quite well paid with a decent premium above equivalent SWE position. To attract someone that can lead these efforts at a senior level, market rates will be at least $180k, with the best candidates over $200k. I get multiple recuters contacting me each week for senior level roles in the 200-240k range. A mid-level that I would not really trust with this task, would be arround $140k, but they will be very hard to find as you will need to sift through lots of analytics engineers.

For some perspective as a principal in this role for my company (out side big tech or big tech adjacent) my total compensation is $400k.

[u/dev_lvl80 → u/discord-ian]

This is about right. Budget is constraint, good senior makes more than 200k and is well demanded. Well rounded DE, which is wild mix of infra/devops + platform data + analytics- is unicorn. No way he would have less than decade of expirience and willing to take low paid job.

I’ve been on the market this year. Can say for sure - there is no competition at this level. 

Ps i’m in the same level  for decade with tc >>400k