Data Engineer / Data Developer
Moves data from where it is produced to where it is used, reliably and on a schedule — pipelines, warehouses and the plumbing underneath every dashboard.
Who to hire
The shape of person who does this job well — and whether you should be hiring it at all yet.
Distinct from a data scientist, who asks questions of data, and from a DBA, who keeps a production database healthy. Hire when analytics is blocked on the pipeline rather than on the analysis — which is usually the case, and usually unrecognised.
Education
Engineering or quantitative background. SQL depth is the floor, not the ceiling.
Experience
3+ years building pipelines that run unattended. Ask what broke overnight and how they found out — observability is most of this job.
Vertical / domain experience
Matters where the data is regulated or enormous. In an ordinary company, pipeline craft transfers between industries easily.
What it pays, roughly
$95,992 median, Canada — for Computer and information systems professionals, the closest occupation Statistics Canada actually measures, measured from $85,010 to $103,002 over 202,605 people. That occupation is broader than this role, so read it as an anchor, not a salary band — and note that a startup usually pays below it in cash and above it in equity.
Credentials and certifications
What exists, who issues it, and whether it means anything for this seat. A credential is evidence of a floor, never of judgment — and in a few of these roles it is a legal requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
| Credential | Issued by | When it matters | Skiploma |
|---|---|---|---|
| A note on the word “engineer” in Canada | Engineers Canada and the twelve provincial and territorial regulators | In a joint statement of July 2022 the regulators restated that “software engineer”, “computer engineer” and related IT titles prefixed with engineer may not be used by anyone not licensed as an engineer — in job titles, postings, résumés, websites or social media. APEGA obtained a court injunction against unlicensed use in 2019 and later pursued a software company over its postings. Alberta tabled Bill 7 in November 2023 proposing an exemption for the title; whether it is in force is not established here, so check your own province before writing it on a posting. This is why Canadian job ads so often say Developer. | — |
| Cloud data engineering certifications | Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft | Reasonable evidence of platform breadth, and the most common credential in the field. | — |
What this role does at each stage
The same title means three different jobs depending on how much money is in the bank. Read the stage you are at, then read the next one — that is what you are hiring toward.
Nobody. A spreadsheet and the product’s own database.
The backend engineer, part time. A warehouse before there are questions to answer is premature.
A seat once more than one team needs numbers and they disagree about them.
Can one person hold this and something else?
The whole point of the many-hats problem: which of these jobs merge safely into one person, and which merges quietly cost you money or control.
Merges well with
- Director of Data / Head of Data
- Backend Engineer / Back-End Developer
- Chief Data Officer (Founders & fractional leadership)
Data engineering and backend merge in a small team; data engineering and analytics merge until the pipelines need daily attention.
Keep separate from
No conflict. Keep whoever defines a metric separate from whoever is measured by it.
Reading a candidate
What good looks like in an hour, and what should stop the process.
Good signals
- Builds for failure — retries, alerts, backfills
- Documents what each table means
- Asks what decision the data serves
Red flags
- Pipelines with no monitoring
- Rebuilds the warehouse before fixing definitions
- No testing of data quality
The same role in three kinds of company
This job changes shape depending on who is paying for it. An agency sells the hours, a contract shop delivers into someone else's estate, and a product company is building something it keeps — and the same title means something different in each.
In an agency
Agencies rarely need this; when a client does, it is usually a migration with a fixed end.
On a client contract
On contract, data migration is the work that always takes longer than quoted. Price the data cleaning separately and explicitly.
In a product company
In a product company this is where analytics debt accumulates — the pipeline nobody owns is the reason the metrics stopped being trusted.
What this role runs on
The software categories this job lives in. Each links to our buying brief and to the research behind it.
| Category | Who the default is | What leaving costs | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Knowledge Management & Enterprise Search | Glean and Notion | — | The research → |
| Revenue Intelligence & RevOps | Gong, and the merged Clari + Salesloft | High, and it is the corpus rather than the contract | The research → |
| ERP — Enterprise Resource Planning | SAP | Implementation sunk cost | The research → |