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Data Engineering roadmap

You move data from many systems into one place, clean it, and make sure it arrives on time and correct. Analysts and AI depend on your work.

Is it for me? Take the quiz

A normal day

  • Automate the daily sales load
  • Investigate why a report is missing data
  • Speed up a query that takes hours

You’ll like it if…

  • You like things that run reliably on their own
  • You are patient with details
  • You prefer building systems over giving presentations

How to start in Data Engineering from zero

  1. Months 0–3: the basics

    • SQL in depth
    • Python
    • Git and the terminal

  2. Months 3–6: your first projects

    • Data modeling
    • dbt and an orchestrator (Airflow)
    • A data warehouse (BigQuery or Snowflake)

  3. Months 6–12: ready to apply

    • Cloud: AWS, GCP or Azure
    • Data quality and testing
    • One end-to-end pipeline in your portfolio

First jobs

  • Junior Data Engineer
  • ETL Developer

Portfolio projects

  • A pipeline that downloads public data daily
  • A mini data warehouse with dbt
  • A dashboard fed by your own pipeline

Tools

  • SQL
  • Python
  • dbt
  • Airflow
  • Spark
  • BigQuery
  • Snowflake

How much does Data Engineering pay?

Median monthly pay in Spanish-speaking Latin America, by experience. The bar runs from the 25th to the 75th percentile of reported pay.

There aren’t enough reported salaries from Latin America for this path yet (we require at least 30 per experience level; there are 38 in total today). We’ll publish it once the data is there.

Official data for Peru

Systems analysts and software developers: median monthly pay S/ 3,470. Half earn between S/ 2,050 and S/ 5,000.

  • Up to age 29: S/ 3,080
  • Age 30 and over: S/ 3,490

National Household Survey (INEI) 2022–2024, 260 people surveyed, weighted to represent the country. It is a broad group: the survey does not separate Data Engineering from other jobs in the group.

Young (18–29) institute graduates in Ciencias de la Computación: average S/ 1,972 a month, most between S/ 1,000 and S/ 3,400.

Payroll records 2020, graduates 2017-2019. It is old data: treat it as a reference floor.

Where these numbers come from

Where to study Data Engineering online

Universities, institutes and bootcamps

Peru

Colombia

No verified options here for this path yet.

Mexico

Chile

See all options with filters →

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