picked.ai/hire/data-engineer
Hire a data engineer
How to hire a
data engineer.
Salary bands, time-to-fill, what good actually looks like, and the assessment we put every candidate through. Built on nine years of validated psychometric data from Neuroworx.
Post this role
~30 seconds
Title, level, three must-haves. We syndicate, screen, score, and shortlist. First 50 candidates free.
Post this role for free →
£115,000
Median salary · United Kingdom
£95-£135k senior range
42d
Typical time-to-fill
down to 4.1d with Picked
168
Applicants per role
Series A · public posting
9 / 168
Make it to interview
industry · pre-AI screening
Salary bands
What it costs to hire one.
2026 H1 · base + variable
LevelUSUKEURemote
IC1 / Junior$83-$115k£52-£72k€56-€77k$69-$95k
IC2 / Engineer$115-$157k£72-£98k€77-€105k$95-$129k
IC3 / Senior$152-$216k£95-£135k€102-€144k$125-$178k
IC4 / Staff$205-$280k£128-£175k€137-€187k$169-$231k
IC5 / Principal$264-$368k£165-£230k€177-€246k$218-$304k
Source · 2,847 anonymised offers placed via Picked Q4 2025 to Q1 2026. Updated monthly.
What good looks like
Past credentials. Present signals.
01
Pipeline reliability
Has been paged for a failed backfill and shipped the change that prevented the next page. Knows the difference between a retry and a fix.
02
Schema judgement
Treats the schema as the contract. Has had the conversation with an analyst about why a column is null and what to do about it.
03
Cost awareness
Knows what their warehouse bill looks like by week. Has cut a query cost in half by changing one partition.
04
Cross-team comms
Can write a one-paragraph explanation of a broken downstream metric. Sits with the analyst when the dashboard is wrong.
05
Honesty about edge cases
Surfaces the late-arriving data, the duplicate event, the timezone bug. Names the case before the analyst finds it.
Nine years of Neuroworx outcome data on 14,000 data engineer hires says: the candidates rated high on pipeline reliability + cost awareness outperform high-prestige-CV candidates by a wide margin in the first twelve months.
Read the paper →
What Picked puts every candidate through
Four stages. Each one written down.
From the Neuroworx item bank · 1,247 items live
01
Triage
CV + cover screened against must-haves. Title, level, language, region, three skills you set. Hard filters first. The model spends no time on people you would not even read.
~12 seconds · $0.12
02
Conversational screen
A 12-minute voice or chat conversation against six structured probes: motivation, scope of last role, the thing they are proudest of, biggest production mistake, what they would build with a free month, why this role.
~12 min · $0.31
03
Role-fit assessment
A scoped task drawn from the bank. Submit a short writeup. Scored against a published rubric on judgement, craft, and pragmatism.
30-60 min · $0.28
04
AI first-round interview
A 20-minute voice interview against six items drawn from the IC3 item bank. Includes behavioural ("tell me about a time"), technical or scenario ("walk me through how you would approach"), and an ownership probe.
~20 min · $0.24
The 1,247 items for data engineer are split across 42 sub-rubrics. Every item has been calibrated against twelve-month performance outcomes from 14,083 prior hires.
See sample items ↗
Sample interview questions
A few from the item bank.
01
Tell me about the last pipeline you owned past launch. What broke first in production, and what did you do?
Listen for: A specific pipeline. A real failure (late data, schema drift, duplicate keys). A fix that names a trade-off.
02
Pick a model or table in your current warehouse you think is wrong. Why has it not been fixed?
Listen for: A specific table. An honest reason for the not-yet (downstream consumers, cost of backfill, fear of breaking a dashboard).
03
Walk me through the most recent data product you took from spec to production.
Listen for: The full arc: source contract, transform, contract with the analyst, monitoring. Specific dates and row counts.
04
What is the smallest schema decision you have fought hardest for?
Listen for: A real example. A primary-key choice, a nullable column, a timestamp type. They say what they would do differently.
05
Pick a data product you use daily (a dashboard, a feed, a report) and tell me how it probably works under the hood.
Listen for: Reasonable guesses at sources, transforms, refresh cadence, caching. They name what they do not know.
See all 30 questions →
Job description template
Copy. Paste. Replace the bracketed bits.
data-engineer.md
286 words · 3 min read
# [Senior/Mid/Junior] data engineer · [city] or remote

We are hiring our [Nth] data engineer. You will own the [X pipeline, currently about Y rows a day]. The team is [N] analysts and [N] engineers. [Who else writes models]. [How the warehouse is used]. [How the on-call rotation works].

## You will be good here if

- You have owned a pipeline in production past v1 and have backfill war stories you can describe with row counts.
- You treat the schema as the contract and can name a time you defended one under pressure.
- [The third trait you actually care about, with a sentence on the behaviour you want].

## What we use

[Warehouse, orchestrator, transformation tool, languages]. We will not retrain you on a stack, but we do not care if you came from [adjacent stack] as long as you can show us a contract you wrote.

## What you will not get

A dashboard backlog you never get to. A warehouse bill nobody owns. An analyst team that treats you as a ticket queue.

## Compensation

[Currency][low] to [high] base. [low] to [high] percent equity. We post the band because we mean it and we will not negotiate against ourselves.

## How we hire

30-second post, screen plus assessment via Picked, 20-minute interview via Picked, one on-site half-day with the team and an analyst. We aim to give a yes or no in 7 days.

## What is the rubric

Pipeline reliability, schema judgement, cost awareness, cross-team comms, honesty about edge cases. Not credentials.

That is the JD. Apply via [link], or just send a paragraph about the last pipeline you owned past launch and what broke first.

[Your name], [your title]
Full JD template page →
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Hire data engineers · Picked.ai