Data Engineer
Also known as: Data Infrastructure Engineer, ETL Developer, Data Architect, Analytics Engineer
Build and maintain the infrastructure that allows organizations to collect, store, and analyze massive datasets.
Salary Range
The highest-paid specialization or seniority level for data engineers.
About 1 in 500 reaches this level
Of ~200K data engineers (est., no BLS code; partially mapped to BLS 15-1243 Database Architects), only the top ~0.2% reach Distinguished Data Engineer at $575K total comp (FAANG-tier) — perhaps 300-500 hold such roles.
Salary data based on 2025 BLS, Glassdoor, and industry reports. Actual compensation varies by location, experience, and employer.
How to Become One
This career typically requires a bachelor's degree. Here are the top colleges for it:
Cost to Qualify
Four years of tuition and required fees runs about $56K at a typical public college in our list (in-state) and about $288K at a typical private one. Both are pricier than the US national averages (about $48K public in-state, $180K private nonprofit, College Board 2025-26) because our 161-college dataset only includes nationally-ranked schools, not every US college. This excludes room and board, which we show separately on each college's page.
Sticker price, not what most people pay — scholarships, aid and in-state status all move it. Room and board is shown separately on each college's page.
AI Risk Assessment
Data engineers build and run the pipelines and databases that collect, clean and store an organization's data so analysts, data scientists and AI systems can use it. Much of the work is writing code, mostly SQL and Python, and AI coding tools are now good at exactly that. A 2025 Microsoft Research study measured how much of each job's tasks AI chatbots can help with, using 200,000 real conversations. Database architects, the government job category that includes data engineers, ranked 77th of 785 jobs, in the top 10% and above software developers (120th). In a 2025 article on how it accounts for AI, BLS wrote that AI tools "have the potential to perform many" database tasks, "such as generating code, predictive analysis, and system integration."
The government expects demand to win for now, and you should see its numbers. BLS projects database architect jobs to grow 9% from 2025 to 2035, much faster than average, because companies adopting AI need well-built data systems. It projects no growth for database administrators, as cloud services let fewer of them look after more companies. Actual job counts agree so far: BLS's employer survey found about 67,100 database architects in May 2025, up from about 59,900 in May 2023.
We rate this a 4 anyway, which is higher than those numbers alone suggest. We rate software engineering a 4, and data engineering is at least as exposed: much of the starter work (writing queries, building standard pipelines, fixing broken data jobs, documenting data) is the kind of coding AI now does quickly. A Stanford study using payroll data found that by September 2025, employment of software developers aged 22 to 25 had fallen nearly 20% from its late-2022 peak, while older developers held steady. We have not found the same data for data engineers specifically, which is the weak spot in our case.
What would change this score. If entry-level data engineering jobs keep growing while AI coding tools spread, this should come down to 3. If junior data engineering hiring falls the way it has for young software developers, it stays at 4 with more confidence.
Sources
Ratings reflect a 10-year outlook based on 2025-2026 research, weighted toward entry-level impact. Individual outcomes will vary.
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