Building Data Teams 101: How to Know Exactly When to Hire Your Next Data Engineer

A practical look at the real signals leaders need to follow instead of panic, ego, or headcount goals.

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This article is part of the Building Data Teams 101 playlist. Click here to explore the full series.

I still remember the first time someone told me it was “weird” that I was leading a team of two (yes, including myself). I was a fresh leader, eager to prove I belonged in the role, and for a moment I let their comment get to me.

Instead of asking myself what problems I wanted to solve or where the business was heading, I walked into a meeting and asked for more headcount.

No plan. No long-term view. Just the quiet hope that a bigger team would make me look more legitimate.

It didn’t feel good.

I had no answer when leadership pushed back with simple questions: What’s the long-term strategy? What would this new engineer work on? Do you have enough workload to justify the hire?

I remember feeling embarrassed. Not because I was wrong, but because I knew deep down I wasn’t hiring to solve a problem. I was hiring to feel important.

Later, when the company grew and the real workload arrived, I slowly expanded the team from two to five and then more. But in that earlier moment, I didn’t need a bigger team at all. I needed clarity.

Most data leaders don’t struggle with hiring. They struggle with knowing when to hire.

The Myth: More People = More Output

Early in my career, I believed the same thing many data leaders still believe: if you’re drowning in work, the fastest way out is to hire more people.

It feels logical. It feels responsible. It even feels strategic if you say it with enough confidence.

But the truth is much less flattering.

Every time I added someone too early, the output didn’t jump. It slowed down.

A new engineer arrives without context, without the history of bad decisions, without the tradeoffs we made last quarter when the system was creaking.

They spend weeks asking good questions that still drag the entire team into the past. The seniors end up teaching instead of building. I end up rewriting plans instead of moving forward.

A bigger team makes you feel safer. It rarely makes you faster.

Execution comes from clarity, not headcount. I learned that the hard way.

When you grow a team too quickly, you don’t get more leverage. You get more coordination. More meetings. More pull requests to review. More opinions about tools you haven’t even decided you want to use.

And the worst part is that you lose the focus that made the work meaningful in the first place. Everyone spreads thin across half-defined tasks because you hired to feel productive, not because the work demanded it.

That’s the real myth:

You don’t scale execution by adding people. You scale execution by adding the right person at the right time, and only when the work is about to hit a wall.

The Real Question: “What Problem Am I Trying to Solve Next?”

When I think about hiring today, I don’t start with job titles. I don’t start with roadmaps. I don’t even start with capacity. I start with one boring, unsexy question:

What’s the next real problem I want this team to solve?

Not the problem my ego wants to solve. Not the problem another team wishes we owned. The problem the business actually needs solved in the next six to twelve months.

That question forces clarity.

If the biggest headache ahead is migrating pipelines, then I probably need a data engineer with strong infrastructure instincts.

If the focus is on improving product metrics, I’m better off with someone who thinks like an analytics engineer.

If leadership is drowning in questions and the team can’t keep up, then the most valuable hire might be an analyst who can turn chaos into insight.

Once you look at the problem first, everything else becomes obvious:

• The role becomes clearer. You’re not writing a generic job description but are hiring someone for one specific mission.

• The timing becomes clearer. Some problems can wait, some can’t. You stop hiring based on discomfort and start hiring based on impact.

• The minimum experience becomes clearer. You can finally answer questions like “Do I need a senior?” or “Can someone grow into this?”

This is why I prefer growing teams gradually.

When you solve one problem at a time, you build a team that becomes senior by doing senior work. You give people space to grow instead of burying them under a mountain of loosely defined tasks that don’t connect to anything meaningful.

And here’s the trick:

When you hire for a problem instead of a title, you avoid almost every mistake early leaders make.

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The Five Signals It’s Actually Time to Hire

Most leaders hire when they feel overwhelmed. But feeling overwhelmed isn’t a signal, it’s a symptom. By the time you’re burning out, the decision is already late.

The real skill is spotting the moment right before the work hits a wall.

These are the five signals I pay attention to now. They’re subtle. But they never lie.

1. When the Team Can’t Learn Fast Enough

This one doesn’t show up in Jira tickets. It shows up in conversations.

You see smart people trying to stretch into new areas like orchestration, warehousing patterns, analytics modeling, and the learning curve turns from exciting to paralyzing. Not because they aren’t capable, but because the gap between where they are and where the work is heading is too big for the timeline.

When the team is learning, that’s good. When the team is only learning, that’s a problem.

That’s usually the moment I know that someone with deeper experience needs to join to unblock the next phase.

2. When You See the Same Problem Surface for the Third Time

Problems repeat in every data team. Pipelines break. Dashboards rot. Work piles up.

But when the same problem shows up three cycles in a row with the same root cause and friction, that’s not bad luck. That’s structural.

And structural problems don’t fix themselves with “working harder”. They get fixed when someone owns the domain with enough clarity to redesign it properly.

This is the moment I often bring in someone who can take that recurring pain and make it disappear for good.

3. When Work Starts Slipping Into Nights and Weekends

I’m not talking about a crunch week. Those happen.

I’m talking about the quiet shift where someone running a backfill at 10pm, someone reviewing PRs on a Sunday morning and someone apologizing for “falling behind” when the truth is they were never set up to keep up in the first place.

This isn’t burnout. It’s misalignment between workload and roadmap.

If people start sacrificing their evenings to keep the machine running, it’s a clear signal the team is under-resourced for the direction leadership is pushing.

4. When You Need Someone to Own a Domain End-to-End

This is the moment that separates junior-feeling teams from mature ones.

A team becomes senior not because everyone has ten years of experience, but because important areas have clear owners.

Someone decides how data is modeled. Someone decides how pipelines are architected. Someone decides how experiments get evaluated.

Ownership is where seniority actually lives.

When the team needs a domain owner and no one has the bandwidth, that’s when I hire.

5. When the Future Work Requires Skills the Team Doesn’t Yet Have

This is where most leaders overestimate their teams and underestimate the complexity of what’s coming.

New product line? Big machine learning initiative? Rewriting the warehouse? Scaling ingestion?

You can’t magically “learn your way” into every project. Some things require someone who’s seen the movie before.

But here’s the nuance: I hire for how someone thinks, learns, and makes decisions far more than I hire for years of experience. I want to know how they choose tools, how they reason under uncertainty, and how they handle long-term consequences.

Years don’t make someone senior. Experiences do.

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Before we go further, I’m sharing a Headcount Business Case template for paid subscribers. It’s the exact document I wish I had early in my career when I needed to justify a hire without sounding unsure or unprepared.