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.