I sat on a hiring panel last month where we reviewed 340 applications for a single mid-level data engineer role. SQL, Airflow, dbt, Snowflake. Every resume looked the same. I'm not exaggerating; I mean structurally identical. Same tools, same bullet points, same "built and maintained ELT pipelines" phrasing. We could've shuffled the names and nobody would've noticed. That same week, a colleague pinged me about a role on a different team. They were looking for someone who could build retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, tune embedding models for search, and wire vector databases into their existing warehouse infrastructure. They had four applicants. Four. The comp? 35% higher than the role with 340 candidates. That's the data engineer salary market in 2026. It's not one market anymore. It's two. The Split Is Already Here I've been through enough hype cycles to know the difference between a trend and noise. This isn't noise.…