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Skills › governance

Data quality jobs: demand and pay (October 2026)

2,451 open data & AI postings at 1,200 companies mention Data quality, or 18.7% of all data & AI postings we track (as of October 18, 2026).

18.7%share of data & AI postings
1,200companies hiring
$175Kmedian pay, US (n=813)
—week over week (needs more history)

Data quality pay by level

Level (from title)Median payPostings with pay (n)
Intern—2
Entry / junior—7
Mid (II)—9
Senior$175K234
Staff / lead$205K116
Principal$201K28
Manager$185K65
Director+$220K75
Level not stated$150K277

Median of the published range midpoint, US postings in USD, annualized. Shown only when n ≥ 10; “—” means fewer.

Roles that ask for Data quality

RolePostings% of that role
Data Engineer85247.9%
Data Analyst31828.2%
Analytics Engineer23062.2%
Data & AI leadership20319.1%
Data Scientist20213.1%
AI Engineer1734.6%
Machine Learning Engineer1477.4%
Data Governance & Quality14163.8%
Data Architect9423.7%
BI Developer / Analyst6241.3%
AI Research Scientist245.5%
Database Engineer / DBA51.6%

The weekly Data Skills Index

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How it's measured: a posting counts if its title or description matches the Data quality patterns in our taxonomy. Postings by the vendor itself are excluded. See the methodology.