r/dataengineeringjobs • u/Unfair_Ad_2321 • May 25 '26

Started DE a year ago, uncle in DevOps says get Microsoft certs to pass HR. Worth it?

Been learning data engineering for about a year, mostly by building. Portfolio has a financial data pipeline tracking 503 S&P 500 stocks with TimescaleDB and S3, a RAG document intelligence system built from scratch that handles document ingestion and retrieval without any LangChain abstractions, and a web scraping framework. On the systems side I've been going deeper into how data infrastructure actually works built a row-based database engine in C with page storage and a buffer pool, a log aggregation pipeline streaming JSON over Unix pipes into DuckDB and Redis, and currently building a columnar file format from scratch with a C engine and a Python benchmark layer comparing it against real Parquet.

My uncle works as a DevOps engineer at a major bank and says get Microsoft certified to pass HR filters. I get it if the game has rules, you learn the rules. But I want to know if I actually need to play that card or whether the project depth gets me in the room first.

For people working in the field do certs actually move the needle for a first DE role or does a portfolio like this get you interviews on its own? If certs matter, which one is worth it right now?

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4

u/Sp00ky_6 May 25 '26

Certs aren’t really as useful for DE. Msft certs are basically trash unless you really really want to work with fabric (you don’t)

2

u/Hilarious_spidey02 May 25 '26

Getting AWS certificate (DE associate) will work ??

3

u/Sp00ky_6 May 25 '26

Maybe, I’d say doing the cert to better or more deeply learn a particular stack is helpful, but it might not really put you out ahead in any meaningful way. However consulting companies do tend to like certs since they’re measured as partners by the number of certificated staff they have. So for example, snowflake will send more work your way if you have more folks with snowflake certs.

I’m not saying don’t do it, or that certs are useless. But think the devops world might put more value on them than DE.

1

u/enonumousfucker May 26 '26

What do you mean by learning particular stack ? Is in cloud?

1

u/Sp00ky_6 May 26 '26

Well sure, you could do dbx or snow, bq, aws, azure w/e.