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Data Engineer

Becoming a Data Engineer means building the skills below in roughly this order. The current median pay for Data Engineer roles on Kairos is $222,500 (55 disclosed listings). 18 of these skills appear in live Data Engineer listings right now.

Demand and pay updated 2 days ago.

01

Programming & SQL foundations

0-3 months
  1. In demand · 75%
    Core

    The default language for pipeline code, glue, and tooling.

  2. In demand · 63%
    Core

    Window functions, CTEs, and query tuning - the daily language of data engineering.

  3. In demand · 11%
    Core

    Schema design, indexing, and transactions with PostgreSQL and friends.

02

Pipelines & processing

3-6 months
  1. In demand · 88%
    Core

    Move and reshape data reliably; model it for analytics with tools like dbt.

  2. In demand · 38%
    Core

    Schedule, monitor, and backfill pipelines as DAGs.

  3. In demand · 36%
    Recommended

    Large-scale processing with Spark and real-time streams with Kafka.

03

Warehouses & lakehouses

6-9 months
  1. In demand · 34%
    Core

    Design and operate an analytical warehouse - Snowflake or BigQuery.

  2. In demand · 36%
    Recommended

    Unify data lake and warehouse workloads for both analytics and ML.

04

Cloud & platform

Ongoing
  1. In demand · 35%
    Core

    Storage, compute, and managed data services on AWS, GCP, or Azure.

  2. In demand · 19%
    Recommended

    Reproducible infrastructure with Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform.

  3. In demand · 16%
    Optional

    Understand partitioning, consistency, and failure modes as data volume grows.

Grounded in

See also

Questions

How do I become a Data Engineer?
Work through the roadmap in order: start with the Core foundations, then layer on the Recommended and Optional skills. The path to building the pipelines and platforms that data teams run on: programming and SQL foundations, batch and streaming pipelines, warehouses and lakehouses, and the cloud and orchestration skills to run them reliably.
Is this roadmap based on real sources?
Yes. It is grounded in O*NET - Data Engineers, AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate, Google Professional Data Engineer. Skill demand and pay are measured live from AI job listings on Kairos.