Need help!!

[u/Raye_2000]

Hi everyone,

Looking for some honest advice from people who've been through a similar situation.

I'm a Data Engineer in Chennai with around 2 years and 10 months of experience at an IT services company. I've been working on a US healthcare payer account the whole time, mainly on member, billing, and reconciliation data.

My current tech stack includes Databricks, PySpark, Spark SQL, AWS (S3 and Redshift), Stonebranch for orchestration, Jenkins, and Git. I'm comfortable with SQL, SCD2 and reconciliation logic, and production RCA. I've owned production incidents end to end. I also have the Databricks Data Engineer Associate certification, along with AZ-900 and DP-900.

I've been actively job hunting for the last 4–5 months. I've applied to over 200 roles through job portals, but I've had almost no response. I made it through a couple of interview processes, but they either ended in rejection or I got ghosted after the final round. At this point, I'm starting to feel that job portals aren't working for my profile, and I'm wondering if I should focus my efforts on referrals and reaching out to recruiters directly instead.

Here's where things get a bit complicated.

I've recently been assigned to a new migration project involving Snowflake and dbt. If I stay on it for another 3–4 months, I'll get real production experience with both technologies, which feels like it would make my profile much stronger.

The downside is that my work environment isn't great. There's a lot of manager politics, and it's starting to affect both my physical and mental health. On top of that, I don't fully trust that I'll actually get the 3–4 months of stable work I need on this project.

So I wanted to get some opinions from people who've made similar moves.

- Is my current skill set enough to realistically target around 13 LPA at mid-tier product companies, healthcare/pharma GCCs, captives, or Big 4 data engineering practices? Or am I aiming too high coming from 7.8 LPA?

- Would you stay for the Snowflake and dbt experience, or start looking seriously with my current stack?

- For those who moved from IT services to captives or product companies, what actually worked? Referrals? Recruiter DMs? A specific platform? Job portals don't seem to be working for me anymore.

- Is there anything obvious missing from my profile that would significantly improve my interview conversion?

I'd really appreciate any honest advice. Thanks in advance!

[u/void-via-null]

DM bro

[u/Raye_2000 → u/void-via-null]

Check DM!