Data Engineering at Cardinal Health
Roles, Comp & Culture
An L6 staff data engineer at Cardinal Health sits around $144K total comp from 10 salary datapoints. The ladder runs from about $144K at senior up to $144K. Cardinal Health pays data engineers slightly below other Healthcare companies. Reviews put them at 3.6 on Glassdoor, a little below the middle of the pack. Employee sentiment at Cardinal Health reads neutral and employee happiness has held flat over the past year. Layoff risk scores low for the next 30 days.
Cardinal Health data engineer compensation
Each level's figure is the median of individual Cardinal Health offers at that level, so it reflects a typical outcome rather than an average pulled up by a few large packages. Total comp counts base salary plus equity and bonus annualized over the vest, and the range shown is the middle half of offers, with the top and bottom quarters trimmed off.
Cardinal Health employee sentiment, tracked weekly
Employee happiness for data engineers over the past year, so you can see which direction it is moving, not just where it sits today.
Cardinal Health sits at neutral on the sentiment side, with mood roughly flat, and a Glassdoor rating of 3.6, which is a little below the middle of the pack. Blind reads mixed. That pattern, stable but not warm, fits what you'd expect from a large, cost-disciplined distributor that treats technology as infrastructure rather than product. Engineers here report manageable pressure and clear scope, but limited autonomy on tooling choices and slower upgrade cycles than you'd see at a pure-play tech employer. Pay comes in slightly below relative to other Healthcare companies, so you're trading some market comp for stability and a defined domain. The 2 executive departures in the past 12 months is worth watching; leadership churn in healthcare IT can stall roadmap clarity, and that's the tension to probe in interviews.
Recent Cardinal Health events
Layoffs, leadership changes, and other major moves at the company, with dates.
Hiring signals right now show no open data engineering roles, which suggests the data engineering function isn't in active expansion. no tracked layoffs in the past 12 months, and the low 30-day layoff risk puts this in a stable zone for someone already inside. But the absence of open roles makes this a poor moment to target Cardinal Health if you're counting on a straightforward application path. The company's broader transformation efforts in specialty pharma distribution and nuclear pharmacy logistics could generate engineering demand in the next cycle, but there's no concrete hiring signal backing that yet. Someone joining now would likely land through a referral or a retained search, and should expect to work within an existing team structure rather than into a greenfield build.
- Exec departureMar 2026Leadership change
- Exec departureMar 2026Leadership change
- Exec departureMar 2025Leadership change
Notable company events we track, with dates.
Cardinal Health's core data problem is logistics at pharmaceutical scale: the company moves drugs, medical supplies, and specialty products through one of the largest US healthcare distribution networks, and the data work reflects that. Inventory positioning, demand forecasting, supplier compliance, and controlled-substance traceability are the domains a data engineer here will spend real time on. That means pipelines where correctness is a regulatory matter, not just an SLA. The visible stack isn't surfaced in current listings, but healthcare distribution at this volume almost always pulls toward warehouse-centric batch processing, EDI integration, and master data management for product catalogs and customer hierarchies. If you want to work on fintech flair or consumer-product real-time streaming, this isn't the setup; if reliable, high-stakes supply chain data infrastructure interests you, the problems are genuinely substantive.
Walk into Cardinal Health knowing the SQL pattern they'll test.
The salary data here covers only senior and staff levels, which tells you something real: Cardinal Health isn't running a large junior data engineering pipeline. If you're at senior level and find the healthcare supply chain domain compelling, the role could fit, though you should expect $144K at L5 and verify whether the scope matches your appetite for infrastructure ownership versus feature work. Engineers who do well in large, compliance-heavy organizations where process matters as much as craft will be comfortable here; engineers who want rapid iteration, open tool selection, or equity upside will find the tradeoffs frustrating quickly. With no open roles listed right now, the practical next step is to check the jobs feed for movement before investing in loop prep, then work through the salary ladder to calibrate your offer expectations against the healthcare peer set.
Preparing for the Cardinal Health loop
The round-by-round process, example questions, and prep plan are on the interview guide.
Compare Cardinal Health with other data engineering employers
How the role, pay, and loop stack up against peer companies.
Prepare at Cardinal Health interview difficulty
- 01
Reading a solution is not the same as writing one
Every engineer who has frozen on a query they had read a dozen times knows the gap. The only preparation that closes it is producing the answer yourself, under time, before the interview does it for you
- 02
76% of hiring managers reject on the coding task, not the resume
From HackerRank's 2024 Developer Skills Report. Candidates who look strong on paper still fail the live screen if they haven't done timed, executable practice
- 03
5 problem shapes cover 80% of data engineer loops
Dedup, sessionization, top-N-per-group, slowly-changing dimensions, partition tricks. Writing the shapes by hand turns the unfamiliar into pattern recognition