Data Platform Engineer: Facts, Skills, and Next Paths

A Data Platform Engineer designs, builds, and maintains the infrastructure that stores, processes, and moves data across an organization. Day-to-day work involves writing code for data pipelines, managing cloud-based data warehouses, and ensuring data is accessible and secure for analysts and data scientists.

Core responsibilities include building and testing data ingestion and transformation pipelines, implementing data governance and compliance controls, and optimizing database performance. This role often sits within a central platform or center of excellence team, supporting multiple business units. For example, NTT DATA hires for a Databricks Platform & Data Engineer to build enterprise-grade environments, while Booz Allen Hamilton seeks a Data Analytics Platform Engineer to organize data for fraud detection and cancer research.

The median salary for this role is approximately $130,333. Employers most frequently request skills in Cloud Platforms and Python or R (both in 70% of postings), followed by Data Engineering (60%), and Data Integration, Data Governance, Database Design, and SQL (each in 50% of postings).