[triplee]

This. Data engineering has ramped up significantly and if you want senior people you'll quickly run out of people who've been exclusively doing "big data" for 5+ years.

So your options are either senior software engineers who have done some data work (that's how I got to be a Data Engineer) or people who've been doing analytical data work (either in the traditional warehousing space or via science/insurance/finance type spaces) that are semi-technical but have no formal engineering background.

The former are people who went to college in the late 90s/early 2000s (like myself) when things were different. The latter need to hyperfocus on coming up to speed in engineering.

I reviewed this guide a couple months ago for my employer to consider as the basis of an internal bootcamp, and I'd note that it's perfect for the audiences I mentioned. Also, even for people with more up to date academic experience, note that the transactional database schemas that software normally deals with often look wildly different than analytical structures.