Course 7 · Career

Career & Getting the Job

You've built the skills and the capstone — now turn them into an offer. This course covers the whole job-search machine: how the market and roles actually work, how to package your capstone into a portfolio that gets callbacks, a resume that survives the screen, structured interview prep for every round (SQL, coding, system design, behavioral), and how to thrive once you land — negotiation and the first 90 days.

Skills get you the interview; this gets you the job

Plenty of capable engineers struggle to get hired because the job search is its own skill — separate from data engineering. This course makes it explicit and practiceable. Pair it with your capstone: that project is the single strongest thing you can point to in an interview.

Chapters
00 Start Here The job-search mindset, how long it takes, and the strategy that turns months of effort into an offer. Read first. 01 The Job Market & Roles The data-engineering job landscape — titles and seniority, who's hiring, how to read a job description, what's realistic for a first role, and how compensation works. 02 Your Portfolio & Online Presence Turn mini-GridDP into proof — a polished GitHub repo, a project writeup, learning in public, and a LinkedIn that recruiters find. The portfolio that does the talking. 03 The Resume & Applying A resume that survives the six-second screen and the ATS — impact-driven bullets, tailoring, and a sane application strategy built on referrals, not the void. 04 Interview Prep I — SQL & Coding The technical screens — SQL patterns that come up again and again and Python/coding rounds. What to expect, how to practice, and worked examples to drill. 05 Interview Prep II — System Design & Behavioral The senior-signal rounds — designing a data pipeline or platform out loud (everything this curriculum taught), take-homes, and behavioral interviews done with structure. 06 The Offer & First 90 Days Evaluating and negotiating an offer, then ramping fast — how to be useful early, build trust, and set yourself up to grow into a senior data platform engineer.
What this course does

It de-mystifies the parts of getting hired that have nothing to do with how good your SQL is — the packaging, the search strategy, the interview formats, and the negotiation. Worked through alongside your capstone, it's designed to take you from "job-ready skills" to "signed offer," and then to a strong first three months on the job.