84.51° Data Engineer Salary by Level

7 data engineers have reported offers or compensation details for 84.51°, and that count is the first thing to hold in mind before reading the medians. A single ladder level, L3, means all 7 reports collapse into one band, so there's no within-company cross-check: a thinly-reported figure at one level can't be validated against adjacent rungs. Some of those 7 are verified offer reports with full comp breakdowns; others are base-only public filings where bonus and equity totals are modeled from peer ratios rather than confirmed by the engineer. The medians as of Aug 2, 2026 are the best available signal for this company, but a pool this size amplifies the weight of any single outlier. Treat the range, $155K-$166K at L3, as more informative than the median alone.

84.51° sits inside Kroger's corporate structure, and that ownership context shapes how offers are built. Total comp at L3 centers on base salary, with an annual target bonus layer that typically reflects retail-sector norms: a percentage of base tied to company and individual performance, paid in cash rather than equity. Kroger subsidiaries generally do not offer significant RSU grants to individual contributor engineering roles the way a publicly-traded tech company would, so the headline number skews closer to realized annual pay than it would at an equity-heavy employer. That means the $163K figure is not a mix of vested shares and a suppressed cash salary; what you see in the base-plus-bonus structure is largely what lands in your account each year. Engineers coming from RSU-heavy offers should convert carefully, since the absence of a meaningful equity component makes direct comparisons misleading.

At $163K, pay at 84.51° sits in line with other Retail companies, which is a reasonable outcome for a subsidiary analytics org in Cincinnati. The likeliest read is that two forces set the floor here: geographic cost adjustment for a Midwestern headquarters, and the compensation ceiling that comes with operating inside a parent retailer rather than as an independent tech entity. Kroger controls resource allocation, and retail operating margins are thin relative to software businesses, so the comp ceiling reflects that margin structure rather than a signal about how 84.51° values data engineering work specifically. The premium for Databricks and Azure fluency that commands outsized pay in coastal fintech or cloud-native SaaS markets gets partially absorbed by the location and parent-company context. That's not a criticism, it's the mechanism behind where the number sits.

The single ladder level in the reported pool means you can't move the offer by targeting a higher rung inside 84.51°'s DE structure the way you could at a company with 4 or 5 visible bands. With 7 reports clustered in a narrow range of $155K-$166K, the band appears tight. The most effective negotiation lever here is the base itself, since there's no equity package to reprice and bonus targets at retail subsidiaries tend to follow fixed percentage schedules. A competing offer from another analytics org, particularly one with a Databricks-heavy stack where your skills transfer directly, is the concrete signal that moves a base conversation at a company like this. Abstract market rate claims are less effective than a specific number from a comparable role. If you're holding an offer, get the competing figure in writing before the conversation, and lead with base rather than total comp.