Data Engineer CV Examples & Writing Guide

This sample is for an engineer with five years of pipeline work who started as a BI analyst, moved into ETL and now owns a warehouse on Snowflake. The name and employers are made up. Copy the layout, then swap in your own stack, volumes and SLA numbers.

For most data engineer roles a working engineer does the first screen, not a recruiter. They spend 40 to 60 seconds and are usually looking for four things.

• The stack, spelled the way the job advert spells it. Airflow, dbt, Spark, Kafka, Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift, Fivetran, Terraform. If they use Databricks and your CV never says the word, you are out even if you know it.
• Scale. Rows or events per day, table and pipeline counts, warehouse size, number of source systems, number of consumers. Scale tells them which problems you have already hit.
• Reliability work. SLAs, on-time delivery, backfills, idempotency, retries, alerting, on-call, incident counts. Anyone can build a pipeline once. The job is keeping 140 of them running.
• Cost. Cloud warehouse bills are a live problem at nearly every company. A candidate who cut spend by a real percentage gets a call.
• Modelling sense. Star schema, slowly changing dimensions, grain, incremental models, partitioning and clustering. This separates a data engineer from a scripts-and-cron person.

“I read the skills line, then I look for one number that shows scale and one that shows something stayed up. If both are there, the rest of the CV gets read properly. If the whole page is a tool list, it takes about fifteen seconds.”

Three or four lines under your name. Job title, years, the stack, then one or two numbers. The most searched versions are for two, three and four years of experience, so those are here.

The usual failure is describing the tool instead of the outcome. "Used Airflow to orchestrate ETL jobs" tells the reader nothing they cannot guess from your job title.

Group your skills so a reader can find the match fast, and put the group that matches the job advert first. If the role is an Azure data engineer role, Azure goes at the top, not AWS.

• Languages: Python, SQL, Scala, Java, Bash. Say which you use daily and which you can read.
• Processing: Spark and PySpark, Databricks, Flink, pandas, Polars, DuckDB.
• Orchestration and transformation: Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, dbt, Azure Data Factory, AWS Step Functions.
• Streaming and messaging: Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub, Debezium and change data capture.
• Warehouses and lakes: Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Synapse, Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, Hudi, Parquet.
• Cloud and infrastructure: AWS, Azure or GCP by service name, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions or GitLab CI.
• Modelling and governance: dimensional modelling, star schema, slowly changing dimensions, data contracts, Great Expectations or dbt tests, cataloguing tools, column-level lineage.

Certifications do not get you hired as a data engineer, but they get you past a recruiter screen and they matter more if you are switching in from analytics or support. Only list current ones with the year.

• AWS Certified Data Engineer, Associate. The current AWS path for this role.
• Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer. Well recognised and one of the harder exams of the three cloud tracks.
• Microsoft Certified: Fabric Data Engineer Associate (exam DP-700). The current Microsoft data engineering certification. Older Azure data engineering exams have been retired, so check which one is live before you book.
• Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate or Professional. Worth having if the job advert mentions Databricks or Delta Lake.
• SnowPro Core. Useful when the warehouse is Snowflake, which it often is.
• Degrees: a degree in computer science, engineering, maths or a related field is the common path, but plenty of data engineers come in from analytics, software, a bootcamp or an apprenticeship. Put education at the bottom once you have two years of experience.

This is the second most searched version of the query, and the honest answer is that a project section replaces the experience section. One deep project beats five tutorials.

1. 1Build one end-to-end pipeline and run it on a schedule for months. Source, ingestion, orchestration, transformation, tests, a warehouse table and something that consumes it. That last mile is what most portfolio projects skip.
2. 2Write the project on the CV like a job: what it moves, how often, how big, what happens when it fails. "Pulls 2M rows a day from a transport API into Postgres via Airflow and dbt, with alerting, running daily since Jan 2026."
3. 3Put infrastructure as code in it. A Terraform file and a Dockerfile signal that you have thought past the laptop.
4. 4Add tests. Even three dbt tests and a freshness check show you understand that pipelines break silently.
5. 5Link a GitHub repository with a real README that has an architecture diagram and a section on what you would do differently. Reviewers open exactly one repo.
6. 6Convert any SQL-heavy job you already have. Analyst, support engineer, financial analyst, QA. Rows queried, reports automated, hours saved.
7. 7Keep it to one page and put the skills line near the top, because a recruiter searching their applicant tracking system for "Airflow" needs to find it.

• One page early on, two pages once you have a few years of experience, which is normal in the UK. Nobody reads a three-page data engineer CV.
• Single column, no sidebars, no skill rating bars. Two-column layouts scramble when parsed, and a rating bar tells the reader nothing.
• Put the skills block in the top third. Recruiters search their system for exact tool names and the parser needs to find them in body text, not in a header or an image.
• Spell tools the way the advert spells them, and include both forms where they differ: "Airflow (Apache Airflow)", "dbt (data build tool)", "GCP (Google Cloud Platform)".
• Submit a PDF unless the form says otherwise, and name it firstname-lastname-data-engineer.pdf.
• Keep a GitHub link and, if you have one, a short technical blog. Reviewers do click, but only one link, so make it the best one.
• No photo, no date of birth, no full address: your town or city is enough. That is the UK convention and it also keeps the top of the page for your stack.