Data Berlin #36
A little rain, a lot of momentum. Your weekly Berlin data brief.
Hope you had a good weekend, we got a stretch of weather that actually felt like summer. From tomorrow the forecast is back to grey and drizzle, which is the city’s gentle reminder to always stay humble and pack an umbrella.
On a brighter note, Italian Gelato Week starts this week, so if the sky won’t play along, dessert still has a plan. Welcome to issue 36: a mix of data and AI bits, Berlin happenings, and a few things worth bookmarking. Whether you’re deep in the stack or just curious about what’s going on around town.
Berlin tech pay is still climbing — and the mood is complicated
Handpicked Berlin just published the 2026 Berlin Salary Trends report: median full-time pay is now €80,000 (+4.6% like-for-like), AI & ML Engineering lands in the top three role families at a €95,000 median; ~61% of respondents say they worry AI could hit job security, even while ~88% use AI tools personally and ~85% say it makes them more productive. There’s also a blunt retention signal: among office-eligible workers, ~69% say they’d quit within six months or immediately start job hunting if their employer mandated 4+ office days per week.
Salary surveys describe the market; databerlin.net/jobs is where we keep a curated, Berlin-first list of data & AI roles (updated daily) so you can browse what’s actually open right now — without wading through generic job boards.
Read the full story + methodology
Summary article: Berlin tech: AI anxiety rising while salaries climb (2026)
Full report: Handpicked Berlin — Salaries 2026 report
📖Interesting Readings
Last month was the Data Engineering Open Forum 2026, the recordings of the talks are now online: 15 talks map the shift from pipeline plumbing to AI-native data products, spanning declarative Spark, agent-assisted workflows, multimodal infrastructure, and observability. – Data Engineering Open Forum 2026 (playlist)
If you suffer from Netflix scrolling and don’t have time to watch all the videos, Pawel Mikler’s recap could help – Lessons from the Best: My Recap of the Data Engineering Open Forum 2026 in SF
Pointing ML work straight at Bronze may ship faster now but invites schema breakage, noisy training signals, and compliance exposure, so a governed Silver-lite path is the practical middle ground. – Why Granting Raw Data Access is High Treason!
Record checks are most effective when prioritized by business impact, moving from structural basics to metric-critical safeguards instead of enforcing every possible rule equally. – Validate Smarter at the Row Level: A Four-Layer Approach
A practical interview breakdown of why strong applicants still get cut: each round rewards a higher-order signal, from constraint framing and diagnostic sequencing to scoping discipline and reflective judgment. – How One Candidate Beat 99 Others for a $200k Databricks Data Engineer Role
A hands-on build shows how one person used Claude plus dltHub’s AI Workbench to ship and deploy a multi-source geopolitical dashboard in an afternoon, including automated pipeline debugging and daily scheduling. – I tracked the Iran-USA conflict, oil prices, and Bitcoin — without a data team
🚀 Shipping Now
MotherDuck’s April roundup adds Duckling monitoring, embedded Dives, agent skills, DuckLake 1.0 support, and better BI connectivity via a Postgres endpoint.
dbt’s April 2026 release notes ship DuckDB CLI support, account-level Slack/Teams notifications, and new AI-assisted developer tooling in beta.
Tower’s first US region brings
us-east-1compute closer to US-hosted data to reduce latency and support region-specific deployment requirements.Databricks May 2026 notes ship community connectors in beta so Lakeflow Connect can reach more sources via open-source connectors you can adopt or build yourself.
Snowflake 10.15 release notes tighten programmatic access token policies, add
COUNT(DISTINCT …)support in ordered window functions, and expose task inventory viaACCOUNT_USAGE.TASKS.Altinity Project Antalya 26.1.11 advances lakehouse-style ClickHouse with cluster joins improvements, hybrid table watermark moves, OAuth2 login for
clickhouse-client, and better Iceberg export and metadata-cache behavior.
☕ Upcoming Meetups & Events
May 6 — Apache Iceberg Europe Community Meetup 🧊 — Link
May 7 — Open Source Data Builders Workshop🔧 — Link
May 7 — PyCon DE Wrap-up and LLM Support Group 📘 — Link
May 12 — Berlin AWS User Group ☁️ — Link
May 26 — Women Techmakers Berlin 🐍 — Link
May 27 — AI Agent Builders Berlin powered by Dataiku 🛰️ — Link
May 28 — Applied AI Conf Berlin 🤖 — Link
May 28 — May We Talk About Data? (Data Berlin) 🐻 — Link
💼 This Week’s Job Picks
📊 Data Analyst
Data Operations Analyst (m/f/d) – adsquare 🎙️ → Apply here
Junior Data Analyst (all genders) – Flaconi → Apply here
Mid Data Analyst - Finance – SumUp → Apply here
Senior Data Analyst - Shop Analytics (all genders) – About You → Apply here
And more here.
📈 Analytics Engineer
Senior Analytics Engineer – SumUp → Apply here
(Senior) Analytics Engineer (m/f/x) – Scalable Capital → Apply here
Principal Analytics Engineer (m/f/d) – AutoScout24 → Apply here
Analytics Engineer (Berlin) – Trade Republic → Apply here
And more here.
⚙️ Data Engineer
Data Engineer - Platform Engineering – N26 → Apply here
Senior Data Engineer (w/m/d) – Humanoo → Apply here
Sr. Big Data Engineer – Databricks → Apply here
Principal Database Engineer, Data Engineering – GitLab → Apply here
And more here.
🤖 AI / ML / LLM + Data Scientist
Senior Data Scientist – adsquare 🎙️ → Apply here
AI Software Engineer – Python (m/f/x) – Scalable Capital → Apply here
Senior AI Engineer (Core Engine) – JetBrains → Apply here
Data Scientist, Growth Data Products – GetYourGuide → Apply here
And more AI/ML roles here and Data Scientist roles here.
If you liked this one, the easiest way to help is to share it with someone who might enjoy the mix, no algorithm required. And with the weather turning again: go easy on yourself, dry off properly, and eat more icecream out there.
— Data Berlin team