AI Model Optimisation Contract Job Trends in the UK excluding London

AI Model Optimisation
UK > UK excluding London

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the UK excluding London requiring AI Model Optimisation skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 30 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 460 368 371
Rank change year-on-year -92 +3 +52
Contract jobs citing AI Model Optimisation 5 3 3
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 0.018% 0.019% 0.017%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.022% 0.022% 0.020%
Number of daily rates quoted 4 3 2
10th Percentile £533 £440 -
25th Percentile £546 £463 £575
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £556 £500 £600
Median % change year-on-year +11.10% -16.67% -
75th Percentile £609 £504 £625
90th Percentile £671 £506 -
UK median daily rate £538 £625 £600
% change year-on-year -14.00% +4.17% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 1
Median hourly rate - - £80.00
UK median hourly rate - - £80.00

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK excluding London

AI Model Optimisation falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills in the UK excluding London.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 22,516 13,744 14,916
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 81.09% 89.12% 82.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 13,080 8,260 8,815
10th Percentile £300 £240 £250
25th Percentile £406 £368 £388
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £598 £575 £600
90th Percentile £688 £653 £688
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,509 1,399 1,350
10th Percentile £13.84 £14.00 £13.87
25th Percentile £17.50 £16.95 £16.50
Median hourly rate £42.65 £22.63 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +88.47% -47.37% +14.67%
75th Percentile £68.00 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £68.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £42.03
% change year-on-year +63.02% -40.16% +0.31%

AI Model Optimisation
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing AI Model Optimisation relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

AI Model Optimisation job vacancy trend in the UK excluding London

AI Model Optimisation
Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing AI Model Optimisation.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing AI Model Optimisation

AI Model Optimisation
Contract Job Locations in the UK excluding London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing AI Model Optimisation within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 30 August 2026. 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
Scotland -20 2 £556 +11.10% 2
North of England -71 2 £550 +22.22% 1
North West -56 1 £550 +22.22% 1
South West - 1 £675 - 6
Yorkshire - 1 - -
AI Model Optimisation
UK

AI Model Optimisation
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding London by Category

The following tables expand on the one above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. They cover the same employment type, locality and period, with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each category:

Application Platforms
1 2 (40.00%) Apache
1 2 (40.00%) Apache Airflow
Cloud Services
1 2 (40.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
1 2 (40.00%) Amazon ECS
1 2 (40.00%) Amazon EKS
1 2 (40.00%) Amazon S3
1 2 (40.00%) Amazon SQS
1 2 (40.00%) AWS
1 2 (40.00%) AWS Lambda
1 2 (40.00%) Dagster
1 2 (40.00%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 2 (40.00%) HTTP
Development Applications
1 2 (40.00%) MLflow
General
1 1 (20.00%) Analytical Skills
1 1 (20.00%) Retail
1 1 (20.00%) Retail Finance
Job Titles
1 2 (40.00%) Automation Engineer
1 2 (40.00%) Python Engineer
2 1 (20.00%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
2 1 (20.00%) Artificial Intelligence Specialist
2 1 (20.00%) Computer Engineer
2 1 (20.00%) Computer Vision Engineer
2 1 (20.00%) Credit Risk Modeller
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (40.00%) AWS CDK
1 2 (40.00%) boto
1 2 (40.00%) FastAPI
1 2 (40.00%) Hugging Face
1 2 (40.00%) JWT
1 2 (40.00%) NumPy
1 2 (40.00%) OAuth
1 2 (40.00%) OpenCV
1 2 (40.00%) Pandas
1 2 (40.00%) PyTorch
1 2 (40.00%) REST
1 2 (40.00%) SQLAlchemy
2 1 (20.00%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 2 (40.00%) Algorithms
1 2 (40.00%) Data Structures
2 1 (20.00%) AI Agents
2 1 (20.00%) Credit Risk
Processes & Methodologies
1 5 (100.00%) AI
2 3 (60.00%) Computer Vision
2 3 (60.00%) LLM
2 3 (60.00%) Machine Learning
2 3 (60.00%) Technical Leadership
3 2 (40.00%) A/B Testing
3 2 (40.00%) Analytics
3 2 (40.00%) API Development
3 2 (40.00%) API Integration
3 2 (40.00%) Async-Await
3 2 (40.00%) Containerisation
3 2 (40.00%) Deep Learning
3 2 (40.00%) Generative AI
3 2 (40.00%) Infrastructure as Code
3 2 (40.00%) Kanban
3 2 (40.00%) OCR
3 2 (40.00%) Problem-Solving
3 2 (40.00%) Reinforcement Learning
3 2 (40.00%) Roadmaps
3 2 (40.00%) Software Delivery
Programming Languages
1 3 (60.00%) Python
2 1 (20.00%) SQL
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (40.00%) Disclosure Scotland
Systems Management
1 2 (40.00%) Grafana
1 2 (40.00%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 1 (20.00%) Foundry
1 1 (20.00%) Microsoft
1 1 (20.00%) NVIDIA