About the board

The title is only part of the job.

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

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 listing called “Data Analyst”

Builds reports in Tableau and answers questions in Excel.

Analyst work

Another listing called “Data Analyst”

Writes Python pipelines and keeps data moving into the warehouse.

Data engineering work

Illustrative examples, not specific job listings.

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 listings on this board, recounted at least once an hour. The date beside them is when they were last counted.

Open roles
Listings we found on employers' own careers sites and saw there again recently. A listing leaves the count once the employer takes it down.
States pay
The share of open listings whose description states pay clearly enough for the listing page to show it. Each listing is checked once, with the same rule its page uses, and again whenever its text changes. The share appears once nearly every open listing has been checked.
Days since first seen
How long ago we first found each open listing on the employer's site. We show the median across the open listings.
Remote
The share of open listings the employer describes as remote. A listing that states no arrangement is not counted as remote.
Top tools
The tools named most often across the open listings. 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 listings 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