Salary of a Senior Data Engineer

The next Step for a Data Engineer or better change the Domain?

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Data engineers provide companies with data by taking it from source systems via data pipelines using ETL or ELT processes and then transferring it to the target platform, e.g. a Data Warehouse, Data Lake or Data Lakehouse. From there, the data can be further processed by Business Analysts, Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers. Data Engineers can advance to Senior Data Engineers after a few years of experience. In the following, I will show you which tasks Data Engineers take on and what salary they earn. Alternatively, Data Engineers can also change their career path and become Data Scientists, Machine Learning Engineers or Product Owners.

Skills and Experiences you need

A Data Engineer should have the following skills — the senior Data Engineer has similar tasks, but often acts more as a supervisor and team manager of several Data Engineers.

Probably you will need a computer science, mathematics, physics or a similar degree including practical working experience in a similar role.
Years of practical experience with big data architectures like Data Warehouses, Data Lakes or Data Lakehouses.
Experience in cloud infrastructures like AWS, Azure or Google Cloud Platform.
Experience with DevOps processes and project management software like Jira.
Experience with data pipelines involving relational as well as NoSQL databases and ETL/ELT processes.
Programming skills in SQL, Python, Java or Scala e.g.

How much does a Data Engineer earn?

A normal Data Engineer in Germany for example will get about 59.300€ (about 68.000$)[1] while in the US, a Data Engineer can earn about $93.272 [2].

As a senior, you can then demand quite a bit more. In Germany, for example €72,208 a year (about 75073$) [3] while the Senior in the US gets about $135,961 per year [4]. My experience is that you currently earn relatively good money in the IT and data sectors. In terms of money, you don’t necessarily have to change fields.

Summary

In these examples you can see that as a senior, you can increase your salary and your responsibilities pretty well. Whether you nevertheless tend towards another direction is, therefore probably not necessarily due to the salary but rather to the development opportunities in the company and the projects as well as your preferences. But one thing can be said for sure, you shouldn’t get bored because the amount of data and the demand for pipelines and platform will grow.

Sources and Further Readings

[1] Computerwoche, Was macht ein Data Engineer (2021)

[2] payscale, Average Data Engineer Salary (2022)

[3] payscale, Average Senior Data Engineer Salary in Germany (2022)