2021 Data Engineer Salary Report Shares Insights on a Swiftly Evolving Market

Over the past few years, the data engineering market has seen tremendous growth, and as we’ve seen more companies focus on hiring data engineers to build data infrastructure and pipelines (instead of assigning these tasks to data scientists), we anticipate the market will only continue to grow.

As recruiters, we have conversations with and collect data from a wide range of data teams and professionals across every industry, and our goal in creating our free industry reports is to share our wealth of data and information with employers and the data community.

While we’ve been producing salary reports on data science & analytics professionals since 2013 (and have had our research featured in the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, among many others), the acceleration of the data engineering market prompted us to create a new report specifically for data engineering professionals.

The full report, which can be downloaded for free here, covers a variety of compensation & market trends including:

1. 2021 salaries & bonuses - We segmented data engineering professionals into four job categories depending on their experience level and management responsibility to better analyze their salaries and bonuses.

2. Data engineer demographic profile & trends – This section shares highest degree earned, area of study, industry of employment, gender, and years of experience.

3. Identifying data engineers – This section shares some of our criteria for identifying & defining the data engineers included in this report, including typical tools, skills, responsibilities, and job titles.

4. Trend analysis & market insights – In addition to salaries/bonuses, the report also includes our research and insights on trends including:

• Hiring and WFH among data professionals
• Data engineering tool trends: cloud migrations, Snowflake, and Kubernetes
• Reporting structure & data team organization
• How data engineer backgrounds vary from those in data science
• The hiring push underway in healthcare

5. Research on talent retention – We also included results from our latest survey on what keeps data professionals satisfied in their role. While many data engineers understandably paused job searches in 2020, this year many professionals are exploring new opportunities, which is fueling attrition.

You can download both the 2021 Data Engineering and 2021 Data Science & Analytics salary reports from our website for free here, and you can find a summary of market trends we highlighted on our blog here.