Based on 2026 hiring data and project demand: the skills that compound and the ones that are now legacy maintenance work.
Compounding skills
- Iceberg + Polaris (open table formats + catalogs)
- dbt + analytics engineering
- Streaming (Flink, Kafka)
- Vector DBs + RAG architecture
- FinOps + cost-aware design
Legacy maintenance
- Hand-rolled Spark ETL with no testing
- Hadoop / Hive on-prem
- Pure Airflow scheduling without dbt
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