What Principal Data Engineering Jobs Ask For
Across 933 open Principal Data Engineering postings that list skills, the ones mentioned most often are cloud, data-engineering, analytics.
Updated September 19, 2026
1,014 open Principal Data Engineering postings. The percentages below are measured over the 933 of them that list skills at all.
| Skill | Mentioned in |
|---|---|
| cloud | 74% |
| data-engineering | 72% |
| analytics | 59% |
| sql | 58% |
| python | 58% |
| ai | 56% |
| data-pipelines | 50% |
| ci-cd | 44% |
| aws | 43% |
| data-quality | 41% |
| azure | 40% |
| spark | 39% |
| databricks | 38% |
| machine-learning | 35% |
| data-modeling | 35% |
| data-governance | 34% |
| etl | 29% |
| observability | 29% |
| snowflake | 29% |
| automation | 28% |
| kafka | 26% |
| lakehouse | 25% |
| infrastructure-as-code | 23% |
| gcp | 23% |
| airflow | 22% |
| devops | 22% |
| api | 21% |
| data-science | 21% |
| elt | 21% |
| agile | 19% |
| data-warehousing | 19% |
| java | 19% |
| terraform | 18% |
| cloud-native | 18% |
| dbt | 18% |
| scala | 17% |
| pyspark | 17% |
| kubernetes | 15% |
| distributed-systems | 14% |
| agentic-ai | 13% |
"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 1,014 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 44,744
- python 43,473
- cloud 39,397
- data-engineering 35,323
- data-pipelines 32,630
- analytics 32,267
- etl 30,454
- azure 26,917
- ai 26,601
- aws 24,687
- data-quality 24,223
- ci-cd 21,081