Data Engineer Salary by Experience (Open 2020–2023 Data, USD)

Salary screenshots on social media are not a market. This table is from 3,755 open compensation records (Kaggle / ai-jobs.net “Data Science Salaries,” work years 2020–2023, reported in USD). It is not 2026 live offer data and it is not India/EU local currency. Use it to sanity-check level language on your resume, not to pick a number to demand.

Data roles, median USD

Role	Records	Median USD	25th–75th
Data Engineer	1,067	$135,000	$100k–$175k
Data Scientist	871	$141,525	$100k–$183k
Machine Learning (titles containing)	375	$148,500	$107k–$195k
Analytics Engineer	109	$143,200	$112k–$184k
Research Scientist	82	$150,000	$105k–$200k
Data Analyst	612	$106,020	—

Applied Scientist and Data Science Manager sit higher (medians ~$184k–$192k) on smaller samples.

Data engineer and data scientist medians are close. The resume implication: title and skill keywords (not a $6k median gap) are what change which bucket a recruiter puts you in. A DE resume stuffed with DS modeling language still gets routed to the wrong hiring manager.

Data engineer by experience level

Codes in the dataset: EN entry, MI mid, SE senior, EX executive.

Level	DE records	Median USD
Entry (EN)	72	$82,500
Mid (MI)	212	$95,000
Senior (SE)	731	$146,000
Executive (EX)	52	$210,457

The senior jump is the one that shows up on paper: more ownership, on-call, warehouse cost, and “you design the platform” language. If your bullets still read like ticket-taking ETL, a “Senior” title in the header will not survive the screen. Pair this with the DE skill checklist (SQL, dbt, Spark) and quantified bullets.

Remote vs on-site in this file

Fully remote (remote_ratio 100) median $135k vs on-site $140k — not a meaningful gap in this dataset. Hybrid (50) looks much lower ($63k) because that bucket is small and mixed. Do not cite this file as proof that remote pays less.

What to put on the resume (and what not to)

• Do not paste these medians into your summary. Recruiters do not filter on your personal salary history in the document.
• Do use level language the JD uses (Senior, Staff) only if the work matches. Inflating EN work into SE keywords is how interviews collapse.
• Do show scope that justifies the next band: SLA, data volume, cost, number of consumers, on-call. That is what this table is really measuring.

For the role page and sample structure, see Data Engineer resume. To see whether this posting’s keywords match your current bullets, run a free resume score.

Source: Open dataset commonly published as Kaggle “Data Science Job Salaries 2023” (originally ai-jobs.net salary submissions). 3,755 rows, work_year 2020–2023, salary_in_usd. Self-reported, USD-normalized, not an employer survey. Job-posting skill stats on this blog use a separate 15 August 2026 public-API corpus (8,991 postings).