Perspectives

Your competitor shipped an AI assistant last quarter. Your board has asked three times in the last two meetings when you're shipping yours. Your VP of Product has a roadmap that includes "AI integration" in the next sprint cycle.

It's Monday morning. Your lead data engineer opens Slack and there are already 11 messages waiting. A Prefect flow failed overnight. A dbt model broke because someone upstream changed a schema without telling anyone. There's a ticket from Finance asking why last week's revenue numbers don't match what the dashboard showed on Friday. And somewhere in the backlog, buried under 23 maintenance items is the ML initiative you announced to the board last quarter. 

You already know the salary number. You've seen the Glassdoor ranges. You know that a strong senior data engineer in the US runs $135K–$170K base depending on market, stack, and experience. If you're in a high-cost metro or competing with FAANG for talent, you've seen higher.