What Is a Senior Data Engineer? How to Become One, Salary, Skills.

Senior data engineers oversee data collection systems and work with fellow data engineers. Here’s what to know about a senior data engineer’s needed skills, salary and how to become one.

What Is a Senior Data Engineer?

Senior data engineers hold primary responsibility over the construction and maintenance of data collection systems, pipelines and management tools. This includes supervising both the functions of junior data engineers and the architectures themselves.

What Do Senior Data Engineers Do?

Senior data engineers guide the building and implementation of databases, data warehouses and data models to store a company’s digital information.

Senior Data Engineer Responsibilities

• Create, maintain and lead projects involving data collection and storage systems.
• Recommend and deploy data models and solutions for existing data systems. 
• Manage junior data engineer operations.
• Ensure data compliance and security needs are met in system construction. 

Day-to-Day Responsibilities of Senior Data Engineers

• Troubleshoot data management issues and offer assistance across teams.
• Collaborate with data architects and data analysts to determine design needs.
• Generate reports on progress for presentation to non-technical professionals.
• Perform data validation testing to ensure accurate data workflows.

Senior Data Engineers Within a Company

Senior data engineers are part of a data science or data analytics team, and tend to report to the director of data engineering or director of analytics within a company.

Importance of Senior Data Engineers

Proper data architecture collection systems and architecture are vital for professionals to access and effectively use company data. Senior data engineers offer authority over the construction and continued operation of these systems.

What Skills Are Needed to Be a Senior Data Engineer?

Qualifications to Be a Senior Data Engineer

• Four or more years of experience in data engineering, data system development or related roles.
• Ability to build, maintain and improve upon data architecture, collection and storage systems.
• Ability to manage and guide other data engineer processes.
• Proficiency in data warehousing, relational databases and Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) technologies.

Senior Data Engineer Prerequisites

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering or related technical field. 

Senior Data Engineer Hard Skills

• Expertise in ETL technologies and processes.
• Experience in big data tools and databases.
• Experience in cloud computing technologies. 
• Working knowledge of computer programming languages (Java, Python, R, Scala).
• Understanding of database security and compliance tools.
• Familiarity with machine learning technologies.

Senior Data Engineer Soft Skills

• Adaptability.
• Critical thinking skills.
• Management and collaboration skills.
• Verbal and written communication skills.

Tools and Programs Senior Data Engineers Use

• Apache Kafka
• Apache Spark 
• C
• C++
• Java
• MongoDB
• NoSQL
• Python
• R
• Scala
• SQL 
• Snowflake

How to Become a Senior Data Engineer

Senior Data Engineer Education and Experience

Senior data engineers typically hold a bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering or similar technical discipline. They may also earn a master’s degree in data engineering, data analytics or a related field for later career roles.

Senior data engineers will need to obtain four or more years of experience in data engineering or data system development to be considered for roles. Knowledge of data warehousing and ETL processes, programming languages (Java, Python, R, Scala), big data, cloud computing and leadership skills are recommended.

Senior Data Engineer Certificates and Courses

• Data Warehouse - The Ultimate Guide
• Mastering Data Structures & Algorithms Using C and C++
• Practical Data Structures & Algorithms in Java + HW
• Python for Data Structures, Algorithms and Interviews!
• Writing production-ready ETL pipelines in Python / Pandas

Senior Data Engineer Career Path

Professionals will likely begin as data engineers before entering into the senior data engineer role. From here, roles like data architect, director of data engineering and eventually vice president of data engineering or analytics are available.

Senior Data Engineer Salary and Job Outlook

Database architects and similar roles, like data engineers, will see a 9 percent increase in jobs by 2031. 

The full compensation package for a senior data engineer depends on a variety of factors, including but not limited to the candidate’s experience and geographic location. See below for detailed information on the average senior data engineer salary.