Data science engineers after senior face a fork that most hiring managers in BC never think about until it is too late. The team they brought on to build models and pipelines suddenly has people asking questions nobody prepared for. Do they go deeper into the individual contributor track, or do they move into management? The wrong answer costs you the engineer either way.
AvitoTech put this on record recently in a conversation about DS career tracks. The honest part, the part worth paying attention to, is that some engineers go into management and then come back to the IC path. Not because management is broken. Because they tried it, realized they missed the technical depth, and returned. That cycle is more common than most engineering leaders will admit.
Here is what that means for a BC business.
If you hire a senior data scientist and give them no visible path forward, you are not keeping them. The engineer now has options. Staff-level IC tracks exist at enough companies that staying somewhere with no growth ladder is a choice, not a default. And when they leave, the institutional knowledge around your data pipelines, your model architecture, your edge-case handling, walks out with them.
The companies getting this right are doing a few things differently. They are explicit about what the staff or principal level looks like before someone asks. They separate the question of scope from the question of people management. A senior engineer who now leads technical direction on three projects but manages nobody is still growing. Treating that as stagnation is how you lose them.
There is also a hiring implication. Fast-track programs like the one Avito is running for senior DS candidates exist because the pipeline of genuinely strong engineers is thin. BC companies that wait for the perfect resume to show up are going to wait a long time. The engineer who is almost there, with the right structure around them, is often the better hire.
None of this is theoretical. The team composition question for data science is now a business operations question. If your DS function is three people doing work that could be systematized, you may not need another senior hire. You may need the existing engineers to spend less time on repetitive logic and more time on problems that actually need their level of thinking. That is where Custom Automations come in. Taking the repeatable, rule-based work off the plate of a senior engineer is one of the highest-leverage things a BC company can do right now.
The engineer who stayed because they had interesting problems is worth more than two who left because they did not.