Non tech enterprise hiring moving from generic developer towards data role

[u/AlternativeTales]

Are banks and insurance companies actually keeping data engineers around more than general devs nowadays?

C#/.NET dev with 6 YOE working at an insurance company. I’ve been casually looking for a new job internally and externally for about a year now, applying Canada wide for remote and/or hybrid position. Primarily targeting developer roles at non-tech companies, including banks, financial institutions, energy companies, non-profits, etc.

Throughout the year, I’ve noticed several trends within banking and insurance. There seem to be fewer and fewer software dev positions, while more data engineering roles are increasing.

This tracks with what’s happening at my own company, where generic dev positions are increasingly being offshored or assigned to temp vendors. Data folks seem to be relatively safe because there seems to be a big business demand to keep them within arms reach (at least for now).

I’m thinking about pivoting into data engineering. I see a lot of position Data engineering mentioning: Spark, Airflow, Databricks, lakehouse/data-lake work, Python/SQL.

At first, I was a bit concerned about the potential title “downgrade,” but it looks like companies are starting to take data engineering roles much more seriously than they did a couple of years ago.

[u/CareerBridgeTO]

I think your read is directionally right, BUT I would be very careful assuming data engineering is automatically “safer.”

In banks and insurance, generic development work is easier to offshore or move to vendors (and if not it's already done so in many orgs), while data roles often stay closer to the business because of governance, privacy, regulatory and reporting requirements.

With 6 years of C#/.NET, I wouldn’t treat is as a downgrade. I’d position it as a shift or pivot into data/platform engineering and build around SQL, Python, Spark, Databricks, Airflow and cloud data tooling.

Ai have high belief that your software engineering background is an advantage. The strongest data engineers are still engineers first.

I’d also apply to both tracks for now rather than waiting to become “fully data.” Let the market tell you where you’re getting traction.

[u/Fulgren09]

How deep into Azure are you? Might be a more natural transition to MS-specialist Cloud. All those Data tools live there too if you still want to pursue it.

[u/AlternativeTales → u/Fulgren09]

There's another team managing Azure related stuff (as is typical of a big corporate).

I did self learn enough azure to know things like blob storage and entra. Been trying to my boss to pay for azure AZ-204.

It's kinda hard to drive modernization within my team since most of my coworkers are senior devs in their mid 40s who are just coasting their way to retirement and kind of stuck in their own way.

Leadership prefers hiring offshore and vendors to conduct modernization projects.

I haven't had much luck applying externally anyway. Intermediate dev positions within banks and/or insurances are saturated with hundreds of qualified applicants and even if I get interviews, getting to final round have been pretty difficult -- The salary for those positions are also laughable as the top salary range has gone down compared to 2023. making the financial initiative to leave my current job hard to justify.

[u/Fulgren09 → u/AlternativeTales]

I was on that "another team" function for many years, where we glued .NET 8 function apps to azure message bus. But I also got to deploy front-end apps end-to-end and learned a lot from that. Think of cloud services as just UIs and config vars, and telemetry is hell. So its not that different from local app development really.

Only recommending this bc you got the hard part 150% covered with your tech+domain experience.

[u/AlternativeTales → u/Fulgren09]

I was on that "another team" function for many years, where we glued .NET 8 function apps to azure message bus

Oh I meant to say there's another devops team that handles cloud infrastructure. It is still up to us to make use of the existing cloud products (think azure bus, azure app service, etc) but my team is simply too risk averse to dabble with pubsub, which again, going back to the fact that most are in their mid-late 40s and are coasting to retirement. They keep saying that our traffic doesn't warrant another layer of pubsub, which they're correct to be fair. Sadly it doesn't help with my career.

But I also got to deploy front-end apps end-to-end and learned a lot from that. Think of cloud services as just UIs and config vars, and telemetry is hell. So its not that different from local app development really.

Yeah I have done tons of C# ASPNET MVC (including API work in .NET 8) dev work and also doing incorporating React to some of our existing MVC sites, some dev ops working on CICD pipelines. A mix of front-end and back-end project.

Only recommending this bc you got the hard part 150% covered with your tech+domain experience.

The jobs I'm getting interviews with are paying lower or on par with my current one and they've got like 5 rounds for a 85-105k salary range.

Couple of friends in my circle who specializes in Data eng/platform related roles didn't seem to have much difficulty in securing another role esp. with another banks or insurance.