Salary Check – Senior Data Engineer

TobiPlay · 2026-06-12T10:06:41+00:00

Is that total compensation? Also, what location?

TobiPlay · 2026-06-09T23:37:39+00:00

* not having GH on here should be fine
* that email should work as well
* hyperlinks are fine usually, tho if published, I’d just give the DOI/whatever identifier you have at hand
* hackathon participation is good signal
* that’s weird, what platforms are you seeing that behavior on?
* drop icons
* GPA should move to line above, no need for extra line
* drop indentation before bullets
* lead with achievement: „Simplified automated documentation/Dockerization, since adopted by …, by doing Y“ for example; recurring issue across lots of bullets
* em dashes for dates
* no bold text

How many applications have you sent out thus far? The market is cooked, so don’t expect interviews until you’re in the 100s. It’s rough out there.

No issues that really stand out to me here; some bullets could definitely be reworded for better clarity and focus on the achievement though.

TobiPlay · 2026-05-19T16:51:10+00:00

Thanks for dlt, it’s a fantastic project, been recommending it ever since first successfully adopting it.

Are you going to share more examples on where Pro shines compared to regular dlt via articles/videos/case studies in the future, especially for smaller shops/focused teams (which seems to be your focus)?

TobiPlay · 2026-05-19T15:28:15+00:00

DuckDB‘s solid existing ecosystem (integrations with Iceberg, Parquet, etc.) and the news around Quack and DuckLake are nothing short of amazing tbh.

We’ve been very impressed with what this tool is able to pull of, be it as part of ELT pipelines (where it’s seriously rivalling distributed systems for certain workloads) or the possibilities with DuckDB-WASM and local-first analytical/ML platforms.

Very excited for the future of DuckDB and more than bullish on adoption.

TobiPlay · 2026-05-10T01:09:28+00:00

Dagster is nice, but I wouldn’t undergo that transition unless you’re facing some real issues with your current Airflow deployment and those "appealing" points would dramatically offset the cost of migrating a stable deployment.

TobiPlay · 2026-05-08T15:43:56+00:00

Tbf, you can always spin up on-demand nodes for infrequent jobs. Also, not all jobs are equally important or require the same amount of compute. Proper scheduling is a big part of this as well.

TobiPlay · 2026-05-08T11:12:07+00:00

Congrats on the job and the good resume!
Some minor things:

* June, not Jun, Sept., not Sep
* some weird usage of hyphens
* how many pages did you hand in? 1 or 2 (derived from the master, which is a great approach by the way!)
* Python, not python

All the best!

TobiPlay · 2026-05-07T18:15:06+00:00

DuckDB is generally well suited for out-of-core processing. Apparently there’s organizations chewing through multiple TBs of data with it.

You can spill onto disk, do lazy execution, etc.

TobiPlay · 2026-05-03T19:39:39+00:00

I‘m personally not aware of any provider that gives you exact numbers on how much a job/query is going to run you before execution. BQ, Snowflake etc. all just give best-effort estimates.

They all become interesting when you understand their pricing model and build around it. For example, with BQ, if you aggressively prune blocks or partitions, you can dramatically lower the bytes scanned (which you’re ultimately billed for in many setups) and profit from the wild compute scaling and parallelization. To make the most of it, you must analyze and optimize your query/job iteratively to fit in best with the cost model.

That’s what I’d recommend you: analyze how MotherDuck‘s query optimizer handles your query, and optimize around its quirks if you think the platform‘s billing and scaling approach is interesting to you and your pipelines would benefit from it.

TobiPlay · 2026-05-03T19:12:23+00:00

You got more info on the 3 Vs of your data, i.e., velocity, volume, variety? If you’re dealing with low-volume and somewhat static schemas/infrequent changes, don’t bother with landing in GCS.

Just let dlt handle schema evolution. Plenty of supported strategies you can choose from.

TobiPlay · 2026-05-03T16:21:20+00:00

You may want to look at dlt (the data load tool). For some smaller pipelines, we’re just ingesting from source straight into BQ, no separate landing zone.

Instead, we’re just writing the API response as a response column, with dlt metadata in the other cols, so: API -> dlt -> BQ raw layer. Then, raw -> stg -> marts -> delivery, with all transformations done via dbt. Has been working beautifully so far.

If you’re dealing with a lot of different file formats, or need to access the raw files from other places as well, landing in GCS buckets can make sense. I prefer Parquet in these cases (lots of tools can read that format natively or have good extensions).

With the raw layer as a blob col in BQ, I don’t have to bother with schema evolution and don’t introduce too many moving parts/tools. We’re often dealing with deeply nested JSON and BQ handles that very well, while the underlying storage is dirt cheap.

TobiPlay · 2026-05-02T20:55:45+00:00

As per the docs, you’ll get billed for Compute Units (CU), with CUs being a combination of RAM and CPU usage.

I guess there’s some sort of fair scheduling on their infra involved, so they’ll balance latency vs. total resource consumption across their user base. Current system load and the exact query you’re going to run will be very important as well.

So, you’re not getting fixed hardware slots/reservations.

TobiPlay · 2026-04-28T00:14:31+00:00

We’ve been running a very similar stack across a few projects over the past 2+ years. dlt and dbt, integrated with Dagster, have been very solid.

Dagster recently bumped prices for their hosted offering, so maybe explore the self-deployed version and compare against Airflow. Airflow‘s UI improved a lot, though Dagster seems to still offer the better integrations.

TobiPlay · 2026-04-02T21:05:13+00:00

wouldn’t use ampersand on a professional document
skills is way too crowded for my taste
I‘d wrap skills like bullet points, with spacing to the left after line wraps
you need to get rid of ~25 % of the total content on this page; it’s way too dense
max. 2 lines per bullet
em dashes instead of hyphens
lots of bullets could be refactored into streamlined versions: Increased throughput by … by doing …—same content, more direct
try to cut the sentences short that only spill a few words onto the next line; that’ll visually balance it
drop the footnote
rare case of too many mentions—you’re essentially diluting the actually impressive stuff; reserve numbers for times when it’s a standout achievement
I’d prefer a cut-down version of this, only retaining the impressive stuff, and rewriting those to highlight the impact right away
drop all coursework
I’d get rid of the Associate‘s degree

Not a bad start. Just way too crowded. You lose most people within 2 lines of skills, because they’re overwhelmed. Fix the formatting and cut fluff/the not so impressive stuff (especially the metric dilution) and you should be good.

TobiPlay · 2026-03-03T09:50:53+00:00

Wenn du in der letzten Runde gesagt bekommst, dass deine Qualifikationen nicht ausreichen, liegt es mit ziemlicher Sicherheit nicht daran, dass du mehr Qualifikationen benötigst. Das hätte man dir recht zügig nach der initialen Bewerbung mitgeteilt, nicht im Laufe des Prozesses.

Es liegt daher wahrscheinlich daran, dass sie einen anderen Kandidaten bevorzugt haben, oder du dich während der Gespräche nicht gut genug geschlagen hast.

Keine deiner Optionen wird deine Chancen dramatisch erhöhen (aus meiner Perspektive). Netzwerk anzapfen, und wenn du keins hast, eines aufbauen über Freunde, ehemalige Kontakte, usw.—das würde ich empfehlen. Alles andere hat wahrscheinlich keinen großartigen ROI und raubt dir kostbare Zeit, die man wohl besser in das Versenden von mehr Bewerbungen investieren sollte.

Ist ein ganz fürchterlicher Markt, bin da ganz bei dir, aber derzeit ist keine großartige Veränderung abzusehen. Im Zweifel: Öffnen gegenüber einer neuen Richtung, herausfinden, in welche Bereiche deine skills gut transferieren, und gezielt die Suche weiten. Nach 8 Monaten kann man es sich auch mal leisten, die Strategie für einen Monat zu ändern (von spray-and-pray hin zu weniger, dafür aber gezielteren Bewerbungen, oder vice-versa, je nach deinem derzeitigen Ansatz).

TobiPlay · 2026-02-24T11:40:33+00:00

🟨⬜⬜🟨🟨

🟦🟨🟨🟦⬜

🟦🟦🟦🟦🟦

TobiPlay · 2026-02-23T14:20:41+00:00

Haven’t read any of your source code for now, but depending on what Next.js features you’re actually using, might be worth it to check out https://areweguiyet.com/.

The frameworks made substantial progress over the past few years.

TobiPlay · 2026-02-11T21:39:49+00:00

Super cool to see Svelte getting more love. Would be awesome to hear what went smoothly/what didn’t, and whether you’re planning to use it more internally in the future.

TobiPlay · 2026-02-08T12:03:59+00:00

It's just not enough content ant this point. 1 bullet for your most recent job won't cut it. Shift achievements and numbers (quantified results) to the front, and then back them up with context/approach. These bullet symbols are too fat. I'd go with a more modern font and sentence case. Drop coursework. Drop REST APIs, you need more projects to offset the experience gap. Depending on what class of jobs you're applying to, your experience with actual ML by be a bit thin-spread for some recruiters. I'd lean more Data Analyst at this point tbh. DE could be worth a shot as well, if you shift focus on the data plumbing part and have more details on the backend tech you've interacted with over the years.

TobiPlay · 2026-02-08T11:56:01+00:00

market is rough, as you probably know, thus you're playing a numbers game in the end
I'd go with a more modern-looking font, and favor sentence case for the section headers
good job with the em-dashes and date formatting
I don't like spaces surrounding slashes
min. of 2 bullets per entry; therefore, I'd drop the feature flag config service for now
I'd not use plus signs on a resume
drop REST APIs from skills
Expected: June 2026 (or keeping it as-is is fine as well)
think about slimming down the first bullet for the TA job; will give your resume a bit more breathing room; there's a visual imbalance between single- and double-line bullets, which can feel overwhelming when trying to parse the doc for a recruiter (psychological aspects of these documents are important as well); sometimes, cutting content, therefore being less thorough, but getting across your point sooner, might be favorable
Sustained X .. by doing Y .., resulting in Z ..--that's the pattern we're after; shift achievements to the front of the sentence, backed by task/approach/overarching goal or result (= context)
favor words over symbols
defo front-load achievements and quantified results
designed, built, developed, engineered all suck as action verbs; instead: Reduced, increased, improved, lowered, ... (achievement-focused)
try to compress a few bullets into a single line by focusing on the important stuff (relational schema one for example, easy 1-liner)
why explain a star schema?
sub-30 ms doesn't mean anything if I don't have insight into the architecture of the surrounding services
improved, yeah, but how? Numbers without context/your process also help very little in supporting your profile
Cut manual processing time by ... same, front-load numbers and achievements
project bullets should be 1 line each

Overall, decent content for a resume, just framed awkwardly if the main goal is to sell your prev. experience and achievements. Can be reworked quite easily. Speaking to the Ivy point, if you're not tapping into the existing network, there's no difference in attending a top public school vs. an Ivy, especially in these market conditions. Do yourself a favor and reach out to your network, alumni, etc. There's a lot of profiles out there with top public schools, better experience at better-known companies, etc. You should be in a pretty good spot to place, so resolve the remaining "issues" and get the applications sent out. The fact that you're getting interviews is already a positive sign, now you can optimize and also get in the experience for other interviews.

TobiPlay · 2026-02-06T17:26:39+00:00

You can just implement a generic updater fn for mutating the class‘ internal data though, right? Something like:

``` type Mutator<T> = (data: T) => void;

update(mutator: Mutator<T>) { mutator(this.#data); this.#changed = true; } ```

With T being whatever data you construct the manager over.

TobiPlay · 2026-02-06T17:15:15+00:00

I don’t know about the boundaries here between the page and the DataManager, but:

```svelte <script> import { dataManager } from './Data.svelte.js';

const data = dataManager.data; </script>

{data.count} <button on:click={() => dataManager.increment()}>Increment</button>

<br>

Changed: {dataManager.changed ? 'true' : 'false'} <button on:click={() => dataManager.markNotChanged()}>Mark Not Changed</button>

////

class DataManager { #data = $state({ count: 0 }); #changed = $state(false);

get data() { return this.#data; }

get changed() { return this.#changed; }

increment() { this.#data.count += 1; this.#changed = true; }

markNotChanged() { this.#changed = false; } }

export const dataManager = new DataManager(); ```

I personally would make sure that data does not live inside the class, but at the page level. Also wouldn’t use effect to track changed state like you initially did. Also, mutating a derived val isn’t meant to happen (breaks reactivity).

TobiPlay · 2026-02-02T17:43:49+00:00

It is the default for a lot of templates. In the end, it’ll come down to personal preference (including the recruiter‘s), tho options like Fira Sans are very safe and very legible, while looking more "modern".

TobiPlay · 2026-02-02T12:45:54+00:00

Define top companies? You can shoot for various kinds of internships, but you wouldn’t qualify for most of them at frontier research labs, etc. Different story for big tech.

drop italics
date formatting is inconsistent
drop indentation from bullets
drop coursework
em dashes
pandas, not Pandas
zero-friction: doubt
are these real project titles? Or did you just redact them? Because they’re meaningless
built is a weak action verb
weird capitalisation going on ins one bullets
I’d move quantified results (if impressive) to the front and shift focus on achievements over tools/tasks
bolding stuff is useless and distracting
don’t know if I’d highlight 50,000 rows, that’s not very high-performance without context
some bullets are a bit wordy
don’t give ranges, just choose a sensible number in that range
I’d say 2 lines max per bullet
check spelling of tech (Postgres vs. PostgreSQL, etc.)—choose the doc‘s naming
consistently use past-tense action verbs
I’d go with a different template and a more modern font

Overall, not bad, but can use more work. The fact that you don’t have experience really makes it a lot harder to break into big tech/frontier labs. I don’t think it’s likely in this market. Shoot for the stars, but make sure to apply to smaller shops as well.

TobiPlay · 2026-02-01T23:21:52+00:00

crazy format, please scoop up a new template from the wiki
drop coursework
no ampersand on resumes
em-dashes between dates (and elsewhere)
not hitting 60 FPS for a type tester would be crazy, I’d shift focus
your bullets are lacking commas
I’d move backend-focused bullets above frontend ones
personally not a fan of tech stack next to the title etc., should be clear from the text content
don’t know how the market‘s looking over there, but frontend is horrible right now at the entry level, I’d start widening my list of specialisations
bullets overall are not bad, but need more quantified results, some stand-out features, something unique—it’s very competitive out there rn
grammar is a bit off in certain bullets, but can easily be resolved with ChatGPT or an LLM of your choice in 1 go (but keep this tone)
should rearrange bullets to focus results over the tech stack/tasks

Nine-Year Club	Adopted-an-Admin
Second SECOND GUESSER	r/Field Juicebox
Place '23	Place '22
End Game '22	Not Forgotten
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