What Principal Data Engineering Jobs Ask For
Across 204 open Principal Data Engineering postings that list skills, the ones mentioned most often are cloud, analytics, sql.
Updated October 28, 2026
208 open Principal Data Engineering postings. The percentages below are measured over the 204 of them that list skills at all.
| Skill | Mentioned in |
|---|---|
| cloud | 82% |
| analytics | 65% |
| sql | 64% |
| ai | 63% |
| data-engineering | 63% |
| python | 62% |
| data-pipelines | 49% |
| aws | 47% |
| data-quality | 44% |
| ci-cd | 42% |
| machine-learning | 42% |
| data-modeling | 40% |
| data-governance | 39% |
| etl | 39% |
| automation | 39% |
| spark | 38% |
| azure | 37% |
| databricks | 35% |
| observability | 34% |
| snowflake | 34% |
| kafka | 30% |
| lakehouse | 30% |
| api | 27% |
| gcp | 27% |
| infrastructure-as-code | 25% |
| cloud-native | 24% |
| dbt | 22% |
| devops | 22% |
| elt | 22% |
| data-science | 21% |
| terraform | 21% |
| agile | 21% |
| airflow | 20% |
| data-warehousing | 20% |
| java | 20% |
| scala | 20% |
| big-data | 19% |
| llm | 16% |
| event-driven-architecture | 15% |
| data-lake | 14% |
"Mentioned in" counts postings that name the skill anywhere — including as a nice-to-have — so treat it as the ceiling, not the bar.
Browse 208 open Principal Data Engineering jobs →
Across all Data Engineering levels
Most Data Engineering postings never state a level. This wider list covers them too.
- sql 6,613
- python 6,359
- cloud 5,938
- data-engineering 5,477
- analytics 5,027
- ai 4,969
- data-pipelines 4,358
- data-quality 3,986
- etl 3,910
- aws 3,820
- ci-cd 3,572
- azure 3,568