The title is only part of the job.

Wait, What Do You Do? helps you find data roles by the work behind the job title.

Same title. Different work.

A Data Analyst might build dashboards at one company and maintain production pipelines at another. Searching by title alone puts both jobs in the same pile.

A job called “Data Analyst”

Builds reports in Tableau and answers questions in Excel.

Analyst work

Another job called “Data Analyst”

Writes Python pipelines and keeps data moving into the warehouse.

Data engineering work

Illustrative examples, not real jobs.

How we organize the board

We collect job postings and put them into a consistent format. Classification uses rules and AI to read the responsibilities and tools in each description, then groups the role by the kind of work it describes.

The full job description stays available. The category is another way to narrow your search; the full description is still the place to check what the employer expects.

Analyst
Reporting, dashboards, and business decisions.
Data Engineer
Pipelines, storage, and reliable data infrastructure.
Data Scientist
Experiments, statistical analysis, and predictive models.
Analytics Engineer
Data transformation, modeling, and the semantic layer.
ML Engineer
Building and operating machine learning systems.
Data Leadership
Leading data teams and setting their direction.
Data Governance
Stewardship, data quality, master data, and governance.
Data Operations
Data operations, processing, migration, and coordination.
Other
Adjacent roles and work that does not fit neatly into one category.

How we count

The numbers at the top of each role page come from the jobs on this board, recounted at least once an hour. The date beside them is when they were last counted.

Open roles
Jobs we found on employers' own careers sites and saw there again recently. A job leaves the count once the employer takes it down.
States pay
The share of open jobs whose description states pay clearly enough for the job page to show it. Each job is checked once, with the same rule its page uses, and again whenever its text changes. The share appears once nearly every open job has been checked.
Days since first seen
How long ago we first found each open job on the employer's site. We show the median across the open jobs.
Remote
The share of open jobs the employer describes as remote. A job that states no arrangement is not counted as remote.
Top tools
The tools named most often across the open jobs. A tool has to appear in at least two of them.
Which pages exist
A page for a role, level or city appears once it has at least five open jobs that have been open for a day or more.

Built by a data engineer

I’m Steve Pisani, a data engineer in Philadelphia. I built this board to make the work in a data job easier to understand before you apply.

steve@waitwhatdoyoudo.com