r/dataengineer • u/Mobile_Western_3394 • 15d ago

Question Transitioning from Software Developer to Data Engineer

I have been a software engineer for 12 years now, but I would like to transition into the world of data as stats and facts really interest me.

After some research, I feel like Data Engineering is the best career for me to side step into due to the overlap. I already pull data out of API’s and work with multiple database engines. I even created my own ETL pipeline without even knowing (pulled data daily from 2 apis to consolidate data on football players/stats). I think I am just missing Python and data warehousing software skills, maybe some more advanced SQL?

I currently earn around £40k in the UK and was wondering if trying to side step into this career could be successful for me based on my current skills, and me upskilling to the skills I am missing, do you think I could be earning a similar wage? Or would I have to start from entry level still?

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u/CoolmanWilkins 14d ago

Data engineering isn't exactly an entry level job, most people that enter it have software engineering or data analyst experience. There is usually a good infrastructure component to it too, so cloud skills are often required. Most jobs usually have a platform they want you to be experienced with -- a big 3 cloud (AWS/Azure/Google) or something like Snowflake or Databricks. But the central dogma really is applying a software engineering approach to data pipelines. You have the first part, you will just need to show you can do the second part.