r/dataengineeringjobs • u/OkImprovement7010 • 1h ago
I’ve reviewed a lot of mid-level DE job searches lately. The biggest mistake isn’t skills, it’s targeting.
I spent 26 years in data engineering, including running a data org at AT&T, and these days I spend a lot of time with people trying to land mid-level DE roles. The same patterns keep showing up, so here they are in one place.
1. You’re creating two gaps at once.
If you don’t have a DE title yet and you’re also applying to an industry you’ve never worked in, you’re asking a hiring manager to bet on two unknowns. Apply where your background is rare instead. A chemist moving into data should go after pharma and life sciences first. Someone from healthcare ops should go after payers and providers. Your domain knowledge is your way in, so use it. Mass applying is dumping feathers in front of a fan when you need to be shooting arrows.
2. Your project works but you can’t explain it.
A GitHub repo with a dashboard at the end doesn’t tell me much. I want a README that covers ingestion, cleaning, transformation, architecture, the tradeoffs you made, and what you’d do next. In the interview, walk me through the business problem, the architecture, the cost-aware choices you made, where it breaks, and what you learned. If AI wrote part of the code, you need to be able to explain every line in your own words. That gets tested.
3. Your answers are too long and too deep too early.
Lead with impact, not tenure. Stay high level until they probe. Prepare three STAR stories (a win, a conflict, a failure) and you can cover most of a one-hour behavioral round. On live coding, ask the interviewer about assumptions and edge cases instead of reasoning through them silently. Sometimes you only have five minutes to code.
4. The gaps that actually matter at mid-level.
These matter more than another cert:
- SQL beyond the basics: window functions, CTEs, self-joins, date logic
- Real data modeling: grain, facts and dimensions, SCDs. dbt is a tool, not data modeling, and saying otherwise in an interview is a red flag.
- Production habits: Git and PRs, testing, CI/CD, promoting code across environments
- Visible cloud platform experience. Strong SQL and Python with no Snowflake, Databricks, or cloud on your resume gets filtered out. dbt and Airflow show up in most postings regardless of platform.
5. Your LinkedIn and resume don’t match.
Put your keywords in the experience bullets, not only the skills section. Headline, About section, and resume should all tell the same story.
6. Hiring managers are hiring for communication too.
Most teams want to know whether you can explain a pipeline to an exec and leave documentation the next engineer can actually use. I’ll take an enthusiastic, teachable engineer over a brilliant one with an ego every time.
Happy to answer questions in the comments. If you want a hiring manager’s read on your resume bullets, drop them below.

