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Data Engineer Salary and Career Opportunities
By - Kaustubh Katdare • 1 year ago • 56.9k views
Data engineering has seen a phenomenal rise in the last few years. We've seen how the demand for data engineers is ever growing, yet the job markets are facing scarcity of skilled data engineers.
One of the top questions engineers looking to switch to data engineering want to know what are career opportunities and salaries offered to data engineers at various levels of professional experience.
Latest data from salary tracking companies show that the median salary for data engineers in the US is $135,343 while In India it's ₹8.5 LPA.
Please note that this is the median salary, and the actual salary offered to employees depends upon their level of experience, company payscale, nature of projects and other factors.
The entry level salary for data engineers in US is about $93,435, while in India it ranges around ₹3.2 LPA to ₹5.6 LPA.
We've also discussed if data engineering is stressful. For the given salary, I think it's worth taking up the data engineering job. There are several remote working opportunities for data engineers.
Career Opportunities in Data Engineering
Before we dive into it; let's look at the companies who are bullish on data engineering with their cloud engineering and services offerings.
Most of the industry-leading tools are offered by Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Services. These companies have developed user-friendly tools and technologies that make the job of a data engineer easy to do.
Companies hiring data engineers
Following is the list of companies that are hiring data engineers. These names, include top global MNCs and startups as well. Take a look:
- WIPRO Limited
- EY
- LTI (Larsen and Toubro)
- HCL Tech
- Mindtree
- Oracle
- Jio
- TCS
- Wells Fargo
- Amazon
- Cognizant
- Philips
- IBM
I've several of my friends and ex-colleagues working at some of these companies at pay that'd make you jealous.
Companies like Amazon pay about 1.5-2x the salary most other companies pay; which already is above industry average.
Salary of Data Scientist Vs Data Engineer
In general, data scientist receive slightly higher salary package in the industry over data engineers. My suggestion is that you should begin your career as a data engineer first; and then make become a data scientist or even machine learning engineer.
This career path offers best of both worlds, making you more successful as a data scientist in your career.
Plus, as discussed earlier the programming languages for data engineers are easy to master.
If you are currently working as a software engineer, database admin, software quality assurance engineer; switching to data engineering career can be rewarding.
Let me know if you have questions. I'll be happy to answer.
Replies
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Rohit Joshi
Decided to write only to highlight the stark difference in the salaries of data engineers in USA and in India. An experienced data engineer in India makes much less than that of his/her counterpart in USA or even UK.
The best of both worlds is that you live in India and work as a data engineer remotely for a US or UK based company that pays in USD!
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Bruce Wathan
Here in the US, data engineering is a rapidly growing field. Following career opportunities are available across several tech companies in the US -
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Data Engineer: Mostly involves data pipeline design, building, implementation and analysis of the data. AFAIK, Microsoft is pretty big on hiring data engineers and sales engineers with background in data engineering.
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Big Data Engineering: If you know Spark, NoSQL, Hadoop and have a bit of programming background, big data engineering could be an exciting career option. The salaries are in the range of $130K - $160K for an experience of 6+ years.
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Cloud Engineer: If you can demonstrate your expertise in AWS, GCP and Azure, you can look for opportunities with several startups. A ton of companies are working in the video infra, data migration domain and large-scale web hosting.
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Data Integration Engineering: A subset of data engineering, but if you are good with ETL and related tools; this is an exciting career option.
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Data Warehouse Engineering: Banking domain for engineers is quite exciting. You'll need a solid background in SQL, databases and general IT administration to make a successful and rewarding career as a data warehouse engineer.
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ML Engineer: Mostly related to data science; but ML engineers are in demand these days. Python would be a must to enter into Machine Learning domain. Lot of good documentation is available on the TensorFlow, PyTorch, Scikit-Learn that help you build and train your data models. You can also foray into NLP, Computer Vision and Predictive Analytics domain.
An exciting career option for sure.
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