Big Data Engineer Salary: Your 2025 Pay Guide

Key takeaways

Big data engineers tend to earn higher-than-average salaries due to their technical skills and increasing demand in the job market.

• The median total salary for big data engineers in the US is $142,000 [1].

• Finance, information technology, management, and retail are some of the highest-paying industries for big data engineers.

• You can start off in an entry-level position like a data analyst and then advance to a data engineering role as you accumulate more experience to earn higher salaries. 

Explore more details about big data engineer salaries and job market expectations. If you’re ready to start preparing for a data engineer role now, enroll in the IBM Data Engineering Professional Certificate. You’ll have the opportunity to gain experience with NoSQL, big data, relational databases, ETL pipelines, and more in as little as six months. Upon completion, you’ll have earned a career certificate to add to your resume.

What is big data engineering?

Big data engineers are professionals who are responsible for developing, maintaining, testing, analyzing, and evaluating a company’s data. “Big data” refers to the sweeping amount of data sets that companies collect in everyday business operations. A big data engineer interacts with data processing systems and databases to extract data and transform it into workable sets that can ultimately be used to improve an organization’s efficiency, profitability, and scalability. 

Data engineer vs. data analyst vs. data scientist: What’s the difference?

It's easy to confuse data engineers, data analysts, and data scientists, who all work with data in different ways. But here's how they differ: data engineers build and maintain the systems that collect and extract data, while data analysts analyze this cleaned-up data to generate meaningful insights and solve business problems. Data scientists, meanwhile, are the ones who build new algorithms to make predictions about the future.

Want to learn more? Explore the difference between data analysts and data scientists.

Salary for big data engineers: How much do big data engineers make?

The median annual total salary for big data engineers in the US is $142,000, according to Glassdoor [1]. However, salaries can be affected by a range of factors, including location, industry, and experience. Below are additional salary estimates from popular job boards [1, 2, 3, 4].

Big data engineer salaries by location

Where you live (or where your company is based) can impact how much you'll make as a big data engineer. Typically, working from bigger cities like New York or San Francisco means a higher salary to accommodate higher costs of living. But, as companies continue to shift toward a more remote workforce, some of them may offer location-based salaries, while others remain commensurate with experience levels.

Here’s a sampling of big data engineer salaries in large- and medium-sized cities across the United States:

Salaries in some popular tech markets are as follows:

All salary information represents the median total pay from Glassdoor as of October 2025. These figures include base salary and additional pay, which may represent profit-sharing, commissions, bonuses, or other compensation.

Remote work vs. digital nomad

Salaries may also differ depending on your nationality and the country you choose to work from. While digital nomadism is on the rise, many tech companies in the US still do not allow employees to work permanently from another country.

It may be attractive to work in Portugal, Thailand, or Costa Rica, but you may need to be comfortable taking a pay cut if you are employed by a company based in any of these countries.

Data engineer salary by industry

Nearly every industry today uses big data, so there is a huge demand for big data engineers to harness that data to drive decision-making. But not every industry pays the same. Knowing which ones pay more can be beneficial for your career.

You can find big data engineering roles in many high-paying industries. Finance and insurance, professional, scientific, and technical services, information technology, management, and retail make up some of the highest-paying industries for data engineers. 

Tech companies are popular to work for because they tend to pay well. Meta, for example, pays from $202,000 to $318,000 for big data engineer base salaries, while Google pays between $217,000 and $345,000 [6, 7]. 

Read more: Data Engineering Salary

Data engineer pay by experience

One of the factors that can influence your salary is your experience level. Generally, the more years of experience you gain as a big data engineer, the more you’ll earn. Here’s how experience can impact your median total salary, according to Glassdoor [1]. 

• 0–1 year: $125,000

• 1–3 years: $134,000

• 4–6 years: $144,000

• 7–9 years: $152,000

• 10–14 years: $172,000

• 15+ years: $201,000

In many of the roles above, “Senior” can be tacked onto the front of the job title to indicate a higher salary, typically of a few thousand extra dollars.

Many big data engineers start off in other entry-level positions, such as software engineers, business analysts, or data analysts. As you advance in your career, you might move into managerial positions or become a big data engineer and then progress as you gain experience.

Salaries for other big data and engineering professionals

Before and after you step into a role as a big data engineer, there are plenty of opportunities to work in big data and engineering. Here are a few of their expected salaries, according to Glassdoor.

• Data analyst: $92,000

• Business intelligence analyst: $141,000

• Business analyst: $105,000

• Database administrator: $106,000

• Data engineer: $131,000

• Software engineer: $148,000

• Data scientist: $152,000

• Machine learning engineer: $158,000

• Data architect: $175,000

All salary information represents the median total pay from Glassdoor as of October 2025. These figures include base salary and additional pay, which may represent profit-sharing, commissions, bonuses, or other compensation.

Job outlook for big data engineers

Big data is being used across all industries, including manufacturing, government, and agriculture, to inform business decisions. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) may categorize big data engineers under statisticians and computer and information research scientists, who have a projected job growth of 8 percent and 20 percent, respectively, between 2024 and 2034 [8, 9].

In 2025, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report stated big data specialists were the fastest-growing job in technology, with a predicted growth of more than 100 percent from 2025 through 2030 [10]. Additionally, 86 percent of companies surveyed in the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 said they anticipate artificial intelligence and information processing technologies to drive business transformations by 2030 [10]. In the same report, respondents ranked AI and big data among the top core skills in their workforce [10].

Discover practical ideas for your career path

Exploring your career options? Get the expert advice and the latest career insights by subscribing to our LinkedIn newsletter, Career Chat! Or if you want to learn more about data science and big data, check out these free resources:

• Take the Quiz: Data Science Career Quiz: Is It Right for You? 

• Watch on YouTube: Data Engineer Career in 70 Seconds!

• Hear from fellow learners: Meet the Learner in Turkey Who Wants to Advance in Data Science

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