Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET)
UK

The following table provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies with a requirement for SDET skills. Included is a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that have cited SDET over the 6 months to 27 April 2024 with a comparison to the same period in the previous 2 years.

6 months to
27 Apr 2024
Same period 2023 Same period 2022
Rank 519 569 567
Rank change year-on-year +50 -2 -67
Contract jobs citing SDET 79 150 296
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.18% 0.25% 0.33%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.21% 0.28% 0.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 57 115 230
10th Percentile £413 £427 £406
25th Percentile £425 £475 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £550 £500
Median % change year-on-year -9.09% +10.00% +5.26%
75th Percentile £575 £673 £625
90th Percentile £630 £695 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £498 £475 £475
% change year-on-year +4.84% - +15.15%

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

SDET is in the Processes and Methodologies category. The following table is for comparison with the above and provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 37,374 53,774 80,482
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.31% 89.91% 90.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,095 37,304 56,474
10th Percentile £300 £325 £340
25th Percentile £413 £438 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% +4.76% +8.25%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £638
90th Percentile £750 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £475
% change year-on-year - +5.26% +9.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,422 1,763 1,928
10th Percentile £12.75 £11.00 £12.50
25th Percentile £16.00 £16.25 £15.25
Median hourly rate £35.00 £37.34 £25.00
Median % change year-on-year -6.27% +49.36% -
75th Percentile £59.44 £65.00 £49.25
90th Percentile £72.50 £75.00 £63.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £36.00 £36.00 £20.00
% change year-on-year - +80.00% -8.17%

SDET
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing SDET as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for SDET in the UK

SDET
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing SDET.

Daily rate trend for SDET in the UK

SDET
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing SDET over the 6 months to 27 April 2024.

Daily rate histogram for SDET in the UK

SDET
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing SDET.

Hourly rate trend for SDET in the UK

SDET
Top 12 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing SDET within the UK over the 6 months to 27 April 2024. The 'Rank Change' column provides an indication of the change in demand within each location based on the same 6 month period last year.

Location Rank Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Matching
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
England +70 68 £500 -13.04% 18
London +36 47 £500 -13.04% 7
Work from Home +126 39 £450 -10.00% 11
UK excluding London +56 25 £498 +4.84% 11
North of England - 10 £500 - 1
South East +33 9 £450 -20.00% 4
Yorkshire - 6 £518 -
North West - 4 £500 - 1
Scotland +14 3 £498 +4.84%
West Midlands +29 2 - - 1
Midlands +20 2 - - 1
Northern Ireland - 1 £550 - 1

SDET
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 5 (6.33%) Confluence
2 1 (1.27%) nginx
Business Applications
1 3 (3.80%) FLEXCUBE
2 2 (2.53%) Oracle BPM
Cloud Services
1 20 (25.32%) AWS
2 13 (16.46%) Azure
3 5 (6.33%) Amazon EC2
3 5 (6.33%) Amazon S3
3 5 (6.33%) Azure DevOps
3 5 (6.33%) GitHub
4 3 (3.80%) Amazon EKS
4 3 (3.80%) Amazon SQS
5 2 (2.53%) AWS Lambda
5 2 (2.53%) GCP
5 2 (2.53%) Serverless
6 1 (1.27%) AWS CloudFormation
6 1 (1.27%) BrowserStack
6 1 (1.27%) Entra ID
6 1 (1.27%) GitHub Actions
6 1 (1.27%) Tricentis Tosca
Communications & Networking
1 5 (6.33%) TCP/IP
2 2 (2.53%) 5G
2 2 (2.53%) Wi-Fi
3 1 (1.27%) DNS
3 1 (1.27%) Internet
3 1 (1.27%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (5.06%) Relational Database
2 3 (3.80%) MariaDB
2 3 (3.80%) MySQL
3 2 (2.53%) MongoDB
3 2 (2.53%) NoSQL
3 2 (2.53%) SQL Server
4 1 (1.27%) PostgreSQL
Development Applications
1 40 (50.63%) Selenium
2 26 (32.91%) Cucumber
3 22 (27.85%) Jenkins
4 15 (18.99%) Git
4 15 (18.99%) REST Assured
5 13 (16.46%) TestNG
6 10 (12.66%) JUnit
7 9 (11.39%) JMeter
7 9 (11.39%) WebDriver
8 8 (10.13%) Bitbucket
8 8 (10.13%) Cypress.io
8 8 (10.13%) JIRA
8 8 (10.13%) SpecFlow
9 7 (8.86%) Maven
10 5 (6.33%) Octopus Deploy
10 5 (6.33%) SoapUI
10 5 (6.33%) TeamCity
11 4 (5.06%) Artifactory
11 4 (5.06%) GitLab
12 3 (3.80%) Gradle
General
1 18 (22.78%) Finance
2 14 (17.72%) Social Skills
3 12 (15.19%) Banking
4 7 (8.86%) Public Sector
5 4 (5.06%) Analytical Skills
6 3 (3.80%) Investment Banking
7 2 (2.53%) Influencing Skills
7 2 (2.53%) Telecoms
8 1 (1.27%) Aviation
8 1 (1.27%) Back Office
8 1 (1.27%) Electronics
8 1 (1.27%) Financial Institution
8 1 (1.27%) Manufacturing
8 1 (1.27%) Marketing
8 1 (1.27%) Retail
Job Titles
1 15 (18.99%) Developer
2 12 (15.19%) Software Developer
3 11 (13.92%) Tester
4 10 (12.66%) Developer in Test
5 8 (10.13%) Software Engineer
6 7 (8.86%) Automation Tester
6 7 (8.86%) Test Engineer
7 6 (7.59%) Development Engineer
7 6 (7.59%) QA Engineer
7 6 (7.59%) Senior
7 6 (7.59%) Software Development Engineer
7 6 (7.59%) Test Development Engineer
8 5 (6.33%) C# Developer
8 5 (6.33%) Test Automation Engineer
9 4 (5.06%) C# Software Developer
9 4 (5.06%) Lead
9 4 (5.06%) QA Leader
10 3 (3.80%) Azure Developer
10 3 (3.80%) Linux Engineer
11 2 (2.53%) Developer/Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 9 (11.39%) REST
2 8 (10.13%) RESTful
3 7 (8.86%) SOAP
4 5 (6.33%) Playwright
4 5 (6.33%) XML
5 4 (5.06%) .NET
5 4 (5.06%) Gherkin
5 4 (5.06%) Middleware
5 4 (5.06%) Spring Boot
6 3 (3.80%) Chai
6 3 (3.80%) JAXB
6 3 (3.80%) JAX-RS
6 3 (3.80%) Node.js
6 3 (3.80%) Spring
6 3 (3.80%) Web Services
7 2 (2.53%) SwiftUI
8 1 (1.27%) .NET Framework
8 1 (1.27%) CSS
8 1 (1.27%) HTML
8 1 (1.27%) Software Packaging
Miscellaneous
1 6 (7.59%) Product Ownership
2 5 (6.33%) Data Protection Act
2 5 (6.33%) Greenfield Project
3 3 (3.80%) Fixed Income
3 3 (3.80%) SWIFT Messaging Network
4 2 (2.53%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
4 2 (2.53%) Private Cloud
5 1 (1.27%) Cloud Native
5 1 (1.27%) Derivative
5 1 (1.27%) Equities
5 1 (1.27%) Legacy Systems
5 1 (1.27%) Machine to Machine
5 1 (1.27%) Mobile App
5 1 (1.27%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 8 (10.13%) Linux
2 6 (7.59%) Windows
3 4 (5.06%) Embedded Linux
4 1 (1.27%) Android
4 1 (1.27%) Apple iOS
4 1 (1.27%) Mac OS
4 1 (1.27%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 65 (82.28%) Test Automation
2 41 (51.90%) Software Testing
3 32 (40.51%) CI/CD
4 30 (37.97%) Agile
5 23 (29.11%) BDD
6 16 (20.25%) Microservices
7 15 (18.99%) Test Scripting
8 14 (17.72%) End-to-End Testing
9 13 (16.46%) DevOps
10 10 (12.66%) API Testing
10 10 (12.66%) Continuous Integration
11 8 (10.13%) Problem-Solving
11 8 (10.13%) TDD
12 7 (8.86%) Fintech
12 7 (8.86%) Manual Testing
12 7 (8.86%) QA Automation
12 7 (8.86%) Software Engineering
13 6 (7.59%) Computer Science
13 6 (7.59%) Integration Testing
13 6 (7.59%) Performance Testing
Programming Languages
1 40 (50.63%) Java
2 25 (31.65%) Python
3 16 (20.25%) JavaScript
4 15 (18.99%) C#
5 11 (13.92%) SQL
6 8 (10.13%) TypeScript
7 7 (8.86%) PowerShell
8 4 (5.06%) C++
8 4 (5.06%) Swift
9 2 (2.53%) C
10 1 (1.27%) ABAP
10 1 (1.27%) Bash
10 1 (1.27%) Scala
10 1 (1.27%) VB
Qualifications
1 10 (12.66%) Security Cleared
2 9 (11.39%) SC Cleared
3 7 (8.86%) ISTQB
4 6 (7.59%) Degree
5 2 (2.53%) AWS Certification
5 2 (2.53%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
5 2 (2.53%) Computer Science Degree
6 1 (1.27%) DV Cleared
6 1 (1.27%) ISEB
6 1 (1.27%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
6 1 (1.27%) PMI Certification
6 1 (1.27%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 26 (32.91%) QA
2 5 (6.33%) Accessibility
3 3 (3.80%) ISO 20022
3 3 (3.80%) WCAG
4 1 (1.27%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 6 (7.59%) Docker
2 5 (6.33%) Virtual Machines
3 4 (5.06%) VirtualBox
4 1 (1.27%) Active Directory
4 1 (1.27%) iptables
Systems Management
1 7 (8.86%) Kubernetes
2 3 (3.80%) Terraform
3 1 (1.27%) Docker Swarm
Vendors
1 12 (15.19%) Oracle
2 4 (5.06%) Microsoft
2 4 (5.06%) Salesforce
2 4 (5.06%) SAP