The ladders for data scientists and data engineers tends to be comparable at these kinds of companies. If you have a quantitative PhD with an emphasis on any domain that has transferable domain knowledge (i.e. anything math/CS/econ probably counts) then you might even be able to start one step up the ladder. But even if you just learned R to do data analysis in some other field that would probably make it much easier to pick up, say, python, and hop sideways.
I should note that the junior-level compensation is probably the most difficult to attain if you’re coming in from another field, since the major pipeline is “college grad with several internships gets hired start into big tech company”. By comparison it’s much easier to get any sort of entry-level engineering role (which is still going to pay pretty well), get a couple years of experience, then go on to one of the big tech companies. (It’s not impossible to get a junior role at a big tech company straight out of the gate; I know several bootcamp grads who have done it. It’ll definitely be made easier by having a PhD.)
The ladders for data scientists and data engineers tends to be comparable at these kinds of companies. If you have a quantitative PhD with an emphasis on any domain that has transferable domain knowledge (i.e. anything math/CS/econ probably counts) then you might even be able to start one step up the ladder. But even if you just learned R to do data analysis in some other field that would probably make it much easier to pick up, say, python, and hop sideways.
I should note that the junior-level compensation is probably the most difficult to attain if you’re coming in from another field, since the major pipeline is “college grad with several internships gets hired start into big tech company”. By comparison it’s much easier to get any sort of entry-level engineering role (which is still going to pay pretty well), get a couple years of experience, then go on to one of the big tech companies. (It’s not impossible to get a junior role at a big tech company straight out of the gate; I know several bootcamp grads who have done it. It’ll definitely be made easier by having a PhD.)