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AI skills glossary · Infrastructure & operations

Data pipelines (ETL)

The jobs that move data from where it is created to where it is used, cleaning and reshaping it on the way. Every AI system sits on top of one.

Hiring data as of November 14, 2026, refreshed daily. All terms in the AI skills glossary

companies naming it
27 of 47companies naming it
open roles naming it
76open roles naming it
of those based in NYC
47of those based in NYC
median posted base (n=40)
$205kmedian posted base (n=40)

What Data pipelines means

A data pipeline extracts data from source systems, transforms it into a usable shape, and loads it somewhere it can be queried or fed to a model. ETL and ELT name the two common orderings of those steps. Orchestrators such as Airflow and Dagster schedule the work; tools such as dbt define the transformations.

AI projects fail on data more often than on models. A retrieval system is only as good as the documents that were ingested, and an agent acting on a stale or inconsistent record will be wrong with full confidence.

Data pipelines in New York job posts

27 of the 47 New York AI companies we track name Data pipelines in at least one open role today, across 76 postings. 47 of those are based in New York; the rest are remote or in the companies’ other offices.

This is engineering vocabulary: 80% of the postings that name it are Engineering roles.

How to read it

Named across a wide set of companies and not only in data-engineering roles: forward-deployed engineers, in particular, are expected to build the pipelines that connect a customer’s systems to the product. If you come from data engineering, this is the most direct bridge into an AI company.

What these roles pay

$190k25th percentile
$205kMedian
$240k75th percentile

Midpoints of 40 distinct salary ranges posted on New York roles that name Data pipelines. Base salary only; on-target earnings are excluded, and a range repeated across one company’s postings counts once. For comparison, the median across all New York engineering postings is $215k. A term’s pay reflects the roles that name it as much as the skill itself — see the role mix below before reading a premium into it. Full bands by function and seniority are in the NYC salary calculator.

Companies naming Data pipelines, daily

Count of companies with at least one open role naming the term. We read between 46 and 47 companies a day over this period, so a move of one or two is noise.

017.53527Sep 20Nov 14Sep 20: 30 companiesSep 21: 30 companiesSep 22: 30 companiesSep 23: 30 companiesSep 24: 30 companiesSep 25: 30 companiesSep 26: 30 companiesSep 27: 30 companiesSep 28: 30 companiesSep 29: 30 companiesSep 30: 30 companiesOct 1: 30 companiesOct 2: 30 companiesOct 3: 30 companiesOct 4: 30 companiesOct 5: 30 companiesOct 6: 30 companiesOct 7: 30 companiesOct 8: 29 companiesOct 9: 27 companiesOct 10: 27 companiesOct 11: 27 companiesOct 12: 27 companiesOct 13: 27 companiesOct 14: 27 companiesOct 15: 27 companiesOct 16: 27 companiesOct 17: 27 companiesOct 18: 27 companiesOct 19: 27 companiesOct 20: 27 companiesOct 21: 28 companiesOct 22: 26 companiesOct 23: 26 companiesOct 24: 26 companiesOct 25: 26 companiesOct 26: 26 companiesOct 27: 26 companiesOct 28: 27 companiesOct 29: 27 companiesOct 30: 28 companiesOct 31: 28 companiesNov 1: 28 companiesNov 2: 28 companiesNov 3: 28 companiesNov 4: 28 companiesNov 5: 28 companiesNov 6: 28 companiesNov 7: 28 companiesNov 8: 28 companiesNov 9: 28 companiesNov 10: 28 companiesNov 11: 28 companiesNov 12: 28 companiesNov 13: 27 companiesNov 14: 27 companies
View as table
Datecompanies
2026-09-2030
2026-09-2130
2026-09-2230
2026-09-2330
2026-09-2430
2026-09-2530
2026-09-2630
2026-09-2730
2026-09-2830
2026-09-2930
2026-09-3030
2026-10-0130
2026-10-0230
2026-10-0330
2026-10-0430
2026-10-0530
2026-10-0630
2026-10-0730
2026-10-0829
2026-10-0927
2026-10-1027
2026-10-1127
2026-10-1227
2026-10-1327
2026-10-1427
2026-10-1527
2026-10-1627
2026-10-1727
2026-10-1827
2026-10-1927
2026-10-2027
2026-10-2128
2026-10-2226
2026-10-2326
2026-10-2426
2026-10-2526
2026-10-2626
2026-10-2726
2026-10-2827
2026-10-2927
2026-10-3028
2026-10-3128
2026-11-0128
2026-11-0228
2026-11-0328
2026-11-0428
2026-11-0528
2026-11-0628
2026-11-0728
2026-11-0828
2026-11-0928
2026-11-1028
2026-11-1128
2026-11-1228
2026-11-1327
2026-11-1427

Who names it

Open roles naming Data pipelines, by company.

Also: EliseAI, EvolutionIQ, H1, Pinecone, Preql, Spade, April, Clay, DataKind, Grow Therapy, Hebbia, Hume AI, K Health, Mirage (fka Captions), Patlytics.

Which roles

The same postings, by function and by seniority.

  • Engineering61
  • Research5
  • GTM4
  • Other3
  • Product1
  • Design1
  • Mid33
  • Senior21
  • Staff/Principal15
  • Manager5
  • Director1
  • Entry1

Named alongside Data pipelines

Terms that appear in the same postings far more often than chance would put them there. The number is how many of the 27 companies pair the two.

Open roles naming Data pipelines

A sample from today’s data, New York roles first and one per company before any repeats. Links go to the employer’s own posting. For the full market, see AI jobs in NYC.

On the AI in NYC Show

How this is counted

Every day we read the open roles on the public job boards of the New York AI companies in our coverage — the NYC AI 100 and the AI in NYC Show roster. This term is matched against each role’s description after removing the text a company repeats across its postings, so an “About us” paragraph cannot tag every role the company has open. A vendor’s own postings never count toward its own name.

The figure means named in a job posting. It does not mean used in production, and a “nice to have” counts the same as a requirement. Companies are the headline number because posting counts are dominated by whichever few employers are hiring hardest this month.

Full method, including the pay rules, is on the glossary index; the underlying series is the NYC AI Hiring Index.

Data pipelines: common questions

What does Data pipelines mean in an AI job posting?

The jobs that move data from where it is created to where it is used, cleaning and reshaping it on the way. Every AI system sits on top of one. Named across a wide set of companies and not only in data-engineering roles: forward-deployed engineers, in particular, are expected to build the pipelines that connect a customer’s systems to the product. If you come from data engineering, this is the most direct bridge into an AI company.

How many New York AI companies are hiring for Data pipelines?

As of November 14, 2026, 27 of the 47 New York AI companies we track name Data pipelines in the description of at least one open role, across 76 postings (47 based in New York). The count refreshes daily from the companies’ own job boards.

What do roles that ask for Data pipelines pay in New York?

Across 40 distinct posted salary ranges on New York roles naming Data pipelines, the median midpoint is $205k base, with the middle half between $190k and $240k. The same figure for all New York engineering postings is $215k. These are employer-posted ranges required by New York’s pay transparency law, base salary only.

Which skills are asked for alongside Data pipelines?

In the same postings, the terms most distinctively paired with Data pipelines are Snowflake, GCP, Azure, dbt, Kubernetes. We rank pairings by how much more often they appear together than apart, so near-universal terms such as Python do not crowd out the informative ones.

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