Data engineering has changed faster than its own discourse. Parsing 76 data-platform job descriptions produces a ranking that does not look like the conference circuit.

• Governance is the job, not a constraint on it. Classification, residency, retention, lineage and access are named more often than any tool. If your answers are all about pipelines, you are answering a 2018 job description.
• Cost is yours. Half of postings name it, and the warehouse bill is usually the second-largest line in a data organisation. Being unable to discuss it is a visible gap.
• Streaming is the default assumption, at least in what postings say they want. Be able to reason about exactly-once, late arrivals and watermarks, even if most of your experience is batch — and be honest that most systems are still batch underneath.
• Do not over-index on dbt. It is genuinely useful and it is not the differentiator its discourse share implies. Modelling judgement is; the tool is not.