How to hire the best database engineer? | List of top 50 database engineers – Assured quality – Dedicated account managers – 100% money back guarantee!

Looking at hiring one of the best database engineers? Here’s a list of the top 20 database engineers, the skills you must look for, and how to hire them!

Do you have questions like whom to hire a junior database engineer or a senior db engineer, database engineer salary, how to go through database engineer resume, and more? Read on to know answers to such questions!

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What is a database engineer?

Database engineers are professionals who design, monitor and update complex databases for computer systems companies. They may work as either applications or systems software developers.

A database software engineer makes sure that a database is operational. Furthermore, he also provides valid and relevant data. An in-depth understanding of computer software, database technologies and programming is required from a database engineer.  

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Market for database engineer

Data engineers are mostly provided with an A employability rating. It implies that this career provides great employment opportunities for the foreseeable future. Over the span of 10 years (2016-2026), it is expected that the US will need 260,200 software engineers.

That number is calculated keeping in mind that 255,300 additional software engineers will be needed, and there will be the retirement of 4,900 existing software engineers. The software engineer market is expected to grow by 30.7% between 2016 and 2026.

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Things to note while hiring database engineer

If you are preparing a database engineer job description, there are certain things you must consider in a candidate. Read on to know them!

1. The candidate must be a strong developer i.e. he must have a strong programming background.
2. The candidate must have knowledge about a lot of languages especially the ones that your company requires.
3. The candidate must have knowledge about a lot of technologies. It should be expected that the prospective employee must already have the technical knowledge about similar products that your company endorses. 
4. Social and communication skills are really important. These are not only important from the client’s perspective but also for the internal teamwork.
5. Creating complex ideas into easier ones. Can the engineer explain a hardcore technical idea to non-technical stakeholders?  Many technically proficient engineers are not considered great because they can’t convert their ideas.
6. Industry knowledge is a must. Great engineers are extremely well informed of software efforts outside their own domain and thus must possess knowledge that has already been created. It makes them more efficient and ultimately more strategic with their time and efforts.
7. Their love for coding. Being an engineer is a great high paying job, which is why many good developers opt for it. Great engineers would code even if that weren’t the case.  They keep their skills updated, and they have the stamina to power through long hours because they are doing what they love.
8. The best programmers are ones that can work tirelessly on a project for months without the feeling of monotony. Must possess the creativity to look for better approaches, they’ll be the first to `rm -rf` their code and ask “OK, what’s next?”
9. They must know when not to write code. They must know when their coding isn’t going to push the company forward in a meaningful way, it’s an exercise in futility.
10. Product-awareness is a must. Most engineers (especially the really talented ones) tend to waste a huge percentage of their time making improvements to things that won’t make the slightest bit of difference in the grand scheme of things. Appropriate candidates are aware of the fact the company exists for a purpose – they have a feel for what matters the most and what doesn’t to the customers.

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Qualities of best database engineer

Are you wondering what are the qualities that you must look for in a candidate? Below is the answer!

1. Curiosity: It pushes people to learn new languages, experiment, and look for new solutions. That’s exactly what you want in an engineer.
2. Technical skills: You can’t expect exceptional results from people who don’t have the right skills for the job. You should think of skills as one of the primary elements of a puzzle.
3. Productivity over speed:  Providing concise, maintainable, and understandable code is superior to punching volumes of codes fast. Why? What you save on a fast but careless developer, you end up spending that on the QA team.
4. Awareness: Best developers know when to code and when not to. Awareness also manifests itself through the risk tolerance threshold. This is important because often you need to refactor live systems. That’s where things can go wrong.
5. Intuition: While some engineers struggle to come up with a solution,  it comes naturally to others.
6. Love of learning: Genuine commitment for continuous learning” is one of the key strengths of an engineer. 
7. Adaptability: The IT world is changing rapidly and as a good engineer, one needs to stay adaptable. It’s a safe bet to hire candidates who are always on the lookout for new tools and ways of doing things. 
8. A positive attitude: One of the qualities of a good database engineer is that they solve problems day in and day out, but that doesn’t mean they should dwell on them.
9. Embracing mentorship: It simply takes less time to figure things out or learn them if you can watch a more seasoned colleague at work.
10. Communication skills: Good communication skills directly correlate with good development skills.

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Data base engineer rate per hour

The prices that a database engineer charges depend upon a variety of factors such as what does a database engineer do, education, certificates, additional skills, and experience.

The average rate per hour for a senior database engineer in the United States is $46 as of December 2020. But, the range typically varies between $39 and $53, depending upon the work profile.

Coming on to Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Belarus, Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia), an hour of developer’s work will cost around $25-50. The average rates of database engineers in Asia and Africa vary between $20-40. 

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Places to find best database engineer

Here are the top 10 sites to hire a best web database engineer or oracle database engineer,

1. unremot.com: If you are searching for remote database engineers in the US, South Africa, and more then unremot.com is one of the best sites to fulfill your requirements.
2. Toptal: The testing of Toptal is so high-level that only 3% of database engineers are able to get through it, guaranteeing that the Toptal talent pool is always at the pinnacle.
3. Dice: Dice is a job board focused only on IT professionals and programming specialists. Their job board is visited by millions in a month so you can rest easy knowing that your posting will definitely be seen.
4. GitHub: GitHub jobs is a technical job board that integrates the GitHub community so that you can easily go to the heart of the developer community and pick as per your preference.
5. Stack Overflow: Their job board internally operates with the database developers’ profiles so that companies and their managers can get to know the candidates a little better before proceeding with an interview round.
6. Upwork: The platform itself comes equipped with a number of features that allow you to comfortably use their gigantic database developer pool.
7. Gigster: Gigster connects clients with product managers, who act as liaisons between clients and Gigster developers. The platform makes the process much smoother, especially for inexperienced managers.
8. SQL Crossing: If you’re an experienced hiring manager or you’re simply confident in your vetting and interviewing skills, a job board like SQL Crossing can help connect you with the leading SQL database developers around the world.
9. LinkedIn: It is, by far, the largest professional networking website available for free to anyone and everyone across the globe. This social media platform is aimed at business owners, white collar professionals, and executives and has nearly half a billion members.
10. IEEE Job Site: The IEEE Job Site is an excellent job portal for companies looking to hire database developers, database programmers, website database developers, as well as PHP database developers.

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Steps involved in hiring best database engineer

While hiring database engineers, determine the following things,

1. Whether you are looking for a junior database engineer or a senior database engineer.
2. Secondly, you need to determine the database engineer salaries that you are willing to offer. You should definitely fix senior database engineer salaries because there is no upper limit to what the database engineers could ask for or get for their services.
3. Nextly, you must fix the entry level database engineer salary keeping in mind that the juniors are inexperienced and shall not be able to provide a lot of depth to their job profile.
4. When you are done with determining the senior database engineer salary, prepare a senior database engineer job description. Because you might have to increase or decrease the budget depending upon the requirements of your business.
5. You must now be equipped with database engineer interview questions. These questions shall help you pick some unique candidates.

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Top 10 interview questions for database engineer

If you’re looking for appropriate questions to select the best candidate then we have got you covered! Following are the questions that would help you!

1. Who is a database engineer?

Rationale: Interviewers should bring this question up to assess whether candidates can discuss their field in an understandable and competent way. 

Sample Answer: Database engineers design and monitor complex databases. They use specialized software to store and organize data. Their role in an organization usually comprises capacity planning, installation, configuration, database design, migration, performance monitoring, security, troubleshooting, as well as backup, and data recovery.

2. What are the essential qualities of a database engineer?

Rationale: An interviewer should ask this question to determine whether a candidate’s idea of a skilled professional matches the company’s assessment. In the answer, expect the skills and abilities that you think are essential for database engineers.

Sample Answer: In my opinion, a great database engineer should have strong math and computing skills, critical thinking, analytical skills, problem solving skills and communication & leadership capabilities.

3. Which job do you prefer- database engineer vs database administrator?

Rationale: The question determines how clear the candidate is with the nuances of the procession. Also, it suggests where the candidate sees his future

Sample Answer: I love coding, hence I would want to write codes all my life. So, I would prefer to be a database engineer.

4. Which frameworks and applications are critical for database engineers?

Rationale: Hiring managers should ask this question to assess the understanding of the candidate regarding the key requirements of the job. Also, to find out whether you have essential technical skills or not. Ask the candidate to be as specific as possible and mention the names of frameworks and applications.

Sample Answer: I think for a basic database engineer, it is mandatory to know Core Data, Laravel, and AngularJS. He should also know cost-efficient bespoke solutions for the IT projects of a company.

5. What is the biggest professional challenge you have overcome as a data engineer?

Rationale: Hiring managers often ask this question. It is important to learn how a candidate addresses difficulties at work. Rather than learning about the details of these difficulties, you typically must determine how resilient the candidate is and how he processes what he has learned from challenging situations.

Sample Answer: Last year, I served as the lead database engineer for a project that had insufficient internal support. As a result, my portion of the project fell behind the promised schedule to the client and I risked disciplinary measures.

After my team missed the first deadline, I took the initiative to meet my project manager and proposed possible solutions. Based on my suggestions, the company assigned additional members to my team for the project and we were able to complete the project successfully within the original timeline.

6. Tell us about a mistake you made and how you handled it.

Rationale: The reason this question needs to be asked is to verify the person’s integrity. Your database engineer needs to accept responsibility for his work. Also, it’s important to know if he will hide the mistake or immediately share the information with his peers and management in order to ensure that everyone affected gets to know there is a glitch.

Sample Answer: “I try hard to prevent mistakes by creating safe gaps and quality checks as best as I can along the way. But, one time I made a mistake and the first thing I did was to report it to my manager, the users and anyone affected.

While communicating I was already reviewing the mistake, fixed it and then prepared solutions to prevent the mistake from happening again, and lastly shared how the issue was resolved and the prevention steps that I recently created.

7. How important is communication to you?

Rationale: Question is important to ensure that they understand the work requirement, working with the team to build relationships and create the best product.

Sample Answer: Well without proper communications, specs, and cross-sharing of ideas, how can one know what he is supposed to do? I share my progress as the work moves on and I ask questions and share concerns if there are problems with the team or the requirements.

8. What programming languages are you familiar with?

Rationale: A database engineer should have experience with a variety of programming languages. This knowledge is vital to having success in this role.

Sample Answer: I am proficient in Java, C++, JavaScript, C#, Ruby and Python. Of these all languages, I feel most comfortable in Java.

9. Are you familiar with object-oriented programming?

Rationale: Some of the most widely used programming languages support OOP. Hence, a database engineer should have at least some familiarity with it.

Sample Answer: Yes. I use object-oriented programming to determine what data and code were found in an object, instead of looking at the more traditional logics and functions.

10. Describe your process for finding bugs in software and applications.

Rationale: Interviewer should know what debugging tools candidate uses and how he fixes the problem without impacting other codes within the application or program.

Sample answer: My process consists of the following steps – discovery, categorization, resolution, verification, closure, and reporting.

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Top 10 tools to use while hiring database engineer

1. HackerRank: It creates coding and technical assessments to help recruiters assess the skills of database engineers. Moreover, it provides an online interviewing tool.
2. Pymetrics state: It has bias-free algorithms to get candidates using gamified neuroscience tests. 
3. Self Management Group: Available in more than 40 languages, having an experience of 35 years, one of their strengths is the very hard-to-do accurate sales profiling.
4. Ideal: uses AI to screen and shortlist candidates by analyzing rich candidate information such as resumes, assessments, conversations and performance data. 
5. Textio: tackles a problem that virtually everyone in recruiting gets i.e. badly written job postings. 
6. Zoom.ai: believes in improving and simplifying the employee experience” through its automated assistant software. Its features include scheduling meetings, transcribing calls, and creating departmental knowledge bases.
7. Bullhorn: It is a software designed specifically for recruiting and staffing agencies.  
8. Greenhouse: the fastest-growing ATS by market share in 2017, is known for its structured hiring and interviewing approach.
9. Lever: a San Francisco based startup, is making a name for its focus on diversity and metric-based recruiting.
10. Breezy HR: It is an applicant tracking system that allows all companies and recruiters  to create a powerful and simple hiring experience

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Dos and don’ts while hiring database engineer

Are you growing the technical resources at your company? Keep these key do’s and don’ts in mind while conducting your next interview,

List of Dos,

1. Create an objective-based hiring profile.
2. Choose budget and goals beforehand.
3. Prepare a coding test to be given to developers.
4. Create a candidate pool before you start with interviews.
5. Prepare a questionnaire for different candidates depending upon their experience
6. Invite honest interactions and provide prospective employees with a realistic view of the job and learning opportunities.
7. Use Realistic Coding Evaluations.
8. Make speedy yet thoughtful hiring decisions.
9. Use hiring tools to find the right candidates.
10. When additional coding tests or rounds are required to separate two or three outstanding developers fighting for the same position, pay them for their time.

List of Donts,

1. Don’t leave anyone hanging or guessing about their status.
2. Don’t repeat questions in the questionnaire.
3. Don’t give too long coding tests.
4. Don’t ask insensitive or irrelevant questions.
5. Don’t take the candidate for granted. He might be more experienced than you.
6. Don’t sound biased and judgemental during the interview
7. Don’t make false promises to candidates regarding the job profile and expectations.
8. Don’t forget to acknowledge the applications.
9. Don’t forget to have a look at the communication and interpersonal skills of a candidate.
10. Don’t forget to have a look at the references provided by the candidate.

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What are the skills required for database administrator?

Analytical skills, communication skills, problem-solving skills, and understanding of complex skills are mandatory for a database engineer. As an interviewer, you must not compromise on such skills. The interview questionnaire should be such that it helps you determine the above-mentioned skills.

How much do database engineers charge per hour?

A junior database developer charges around $35 per hour whereas an experienced database developer charges around $60 per hour. Oracle database engineer salary could be somewhere around $52 per hour.