Counted October 17, 2026 · from employers’ own postings
Data Engineer: $161K median posted pay.
From 425 salary bands employers posted on 930 open data engineer roles in data & science. Never an estimate.
The ladder, by level
What each rung pays.
| Level | Open roles | Median posted band | Middle half |
|---|---|---|---|
| Senior | 352 | $169K | — |
| Staff | 49 | $195K | — |
| Principal | 30 | $215K | — |
| Mid | 21 | $125K | — |
| Management | 10 | $211K | — |
| Junior | 5 | — (1 of 8 bands) | — |
| Intern | 4 | — (1 of 8 bands) | — |
Levels as the postings name them. A rung shows a median only where eight or more postings at that level carried a band.
Who is hiring
The employers with the most open.
| Employer | Open roles | Entry level |
|---|---|---|
| Capital One | 45 | — |
| Bah | 40 | — |
| Booz Allen Hamilton | 34 | — |
| BuiltIn Integration Sandbox | 15 | — |
| Accenture Federal Services | 14 | — |
| Bosch Group | 13 | — |
| Dentsuaegis | 11 | — |
| Air Apps | 11 | — |
| Disney (Disneycareerdc) | 11 | — |
| Costar | 10 | — |
Counted from employers’ own job boards. The ten with the most open data engineer roles tonight.
The skills, as the postings name them
What these postings ask for.
| Skill | Postings | At entry |
|---|---|---|
| Data Pipelines | 847 | — |
| SQL | 747 | — |
| Python | 727 | — |
| Cloud Infrastructure | 614 | — |
| Data Warehousing | 494 | — |
| Data Cleaning | 470 | — |
| Database Design | 388 | — |
| Machine Learning | 388 | — |
| CI/CD | 334 | — |
| Git | 291 | — |
Where the work is
14% of these roles are remote.
- Remote14%132 roles
- Hybrid11%98 roles
- On site57%534 roles
- Not stated18%166 roles
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How this was counted
Every figure is counted from 930 open postings read from employers’ own job boards on October 17, 2026, and recounted every night. Pay is the band the employer posted — never an estimate, never a model — and 425 of these postings carried one. Titles are grouped by the words the postings use, with levels, shifts and schedules removed, so “Senior Data Engineer (Nights)” counts here too. 93% of roles with this title sit in data & science, which is why this page belongs to that career. A title gets a page only where twenty-five or more roles are open, eight or more of them posted a band, three or more employers are hiring for it and four in five of its postings sit in one career, so no page here is a guess.