Director of Data Engineering: Facts, Skills, and Next Paths

A Director of Data Engineering oversees the design, construction, and maintenance of the systems that collect, store, and process data for business use. Day to day, they architect data pipelines, manage engineering teams, and set technical standards for data integration and warehousing, often working directly with cloud platforms like AWS or Azure.

The role typically sits within the IT or data organization and reports to a VP or Chief Data Officer. At Breakthru Beverage Group, for example, the Director leads a transformation to modernize data foundations and enable AI-driven decision-making. At Accenture Federal Services, data engineering managers build scalable solutions for federal clients. At Anthropic, a Data Engineering Manager builds the analytics engineering team that creates data foundations for product decisions.

The median salary for this role is approximately $243,209. The most requested skills in current job postings include Data Engineering (90% of postings), Cloud Platforms (70%), SQL (70%), and Python or R (60%), along with data integration, pipelines, and warehousing (each 50%).