Hiring guide · Engineering
How to hire a
data engineer.
Data engineers build data pipelines, warehouses, and the analytics infrastructure that product, growth, and AI depend on.
Comp range$140k-$260k base.
Timeline8-14 weeks.
When to hire
Hire in-house
You have multiple data sources, analytics dependencies, or AI/ML needs.
When to outsource
Outsource to a studio
You're running on Plausible + a Postgres dashboard. Hire later.
Evaluation · 02
Signs of strong candidates.
Strong signals
- Has shipped production pipelines
- Comfortable with dbt, Airflow, BigQuery / Snowflake
- Strong SQL
- Cost-aware
- Comfortable with stakeholders
Red flags
- ✗No production pipeline experience
- ✗Just SQL — no orchestration
- ✗No cost awareness
- ✗Can't articulate trade-offs
- ✗No stakeholder management
Interview · 03
Questions to ask.
- Q1
Walk me through a pipeline you built. What broke?
- Q2
When would you reach for a streaming pipeline?
- Q3
How do you model dimensional data?
- Q4
How would you cut our Snowflake bill?
- Q5
How do you debug a stale dashboard?
Considering a studio?
We bridge
to your hire.
We help with technical screens. If you're not ready to hire a data engineer yet, brief us — we can fill the gap and help you hire later.
Brief us