Data Engineer Job Market

Data engineer jobs are in very high demand. Though the job market demand is seasonal and fluctuates a lot throughout the year. The overall trend is very encouraging. A quick search on LinkedIn (as of Feb 6, 2023, after the recent tech job cuts) shows 18,373 results for data engineer jobs. Of course, the matching results may include jobs that are not strictly data engineer roles but the relative scale speaks for itself.

Data Engineer Jobs on Linkedin

Compared to data analytics and data science jobs, job demand of data engineers is also usually on par! Many companies have started to realize the importance of data engineering and that’s great news for career switchers.

Data Engineer Jobs by Region

Data Engineer Jobs in the U.S.

If you zoom in on the region level, in the United States, data engineer job demand come from many different states, with a concentration on California, and Virginia, Texas, and New York.

Data Engineer Jobs in Canada

In Canada, the Greater Toronto Area accounted for a large portion of data engineering jobs, followed by Vancouver and Montreal areas.

Data Engineer Job Market: Work Experience

While data engineer jobs are in high demand, it usually requires more experience. Based on WeCloudData’s research and our experience working with different hiring partners and recruiters, we came to a conclusion that in the current job market, and as more companies go through digital transformation, senior roles are in higher demand.

After collecting thousands of jobs from recruiting websites, we did some analysis on the years of experience required for DE jobs which validates our assumption. The chart below shows that 32% of the DE jobs require mentioned 3 years of experience, and usually in job description

Job Market: Demand by Years of Experience

Data Engineer Jobs: Distribution of Work Experience Requirements

However, it doesn’t mean that junior data engineers are not able to find jobs. WeCloudData’s recommendation to career switchers are as follows:

• Hands-on projects can help you fill the experience gap. Unlike data science, there’s no Kaggle-like platforms for data engineers to work on projects. However, it also means that competition will be lower and if you have an awesome portfolio of projects, it’s quite easy to stand out.
• Try to gain end-to-end project experience. Companies would prefer data engineers who have understanding of the entire life cycle of a DE project: data collection, data ingestion, data transformation, etc.

Data Engineer Job Market: Salary

As enterprises pay more and more attention to data, the market demand for data engineering continues to rise. Data engineering is usually the first priority for companies entering the data world. Therefore, in recent years, the market demand for data engineering is very high and has caused a shortage of data engineering talents.

The demand for Data Engineers is the growth in big data engineering services provided by consulting firms like Accenture and other tech companies like Cognizant. The global big data and data engineering services market is certainly experiencing high demand. Growth estimates from 2017-2025 range from 18% to a whopping 31% p.a.

In the mean time, the salary of the Data Engineer is increasing faster than other similar positions. The following charts are the salary distribution of the Senior Data Engineers in the U.S. and Canada.

As you can see, in the U.S., senior data engineer has an average salary of $152,000 USD, and even higher than the average salary for data scientists. Take the data with a grain of salt because this may vary a lot depending on the companies and industries. With signing bonuses and stock options, data engineers joining big tech may get paid well over $200,000 in the first year.

The average base salary of an intermediate level Data Engineer in Toronto is $91,497, according to Glassdoor’s 2022 market data. Here is a breakdown of the Data Engineer salaries by level: