AI Model Optimisation Contract Job Trends

AI Model Optimisation
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs 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 667 546 552
Rank change year-on-year -121 +6 +82
Contract jobs citing AI Model Optimisation 15 14 5
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.028% 0.042% 0.013%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.033% 0.047% 0.015%
Number of daily rates quoted 12 14 3
10th Percentile - £448 -
25th Percentile £500 £508 £575
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £625 £600
Median % change year-on-year -14.00% +4.17% -
75th Percentile £581 £638 £738
90th Percentile £645 £646 £805
UK excluding London median daily rate £556 £500 £600
% change year-on-year +11.10% -16.67% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 1
Median hourly rate - - £80.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - £80.00

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

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.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 45,677 29,801 32,930
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.61% 90.45% 85.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,947 18,563 20,756
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,899 1,765 1,620
10th Percentile £14.10 £14.21 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.85 £17.30 £18.50
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £42.03
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -40.16% +0.31%
75th Percentile £67.84 £47.12 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.15 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.65 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +88.47% -47.37% +14.67%

AI Model Optimisation
Job Vacancy Trend

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

AI Model Optimisation job vacancy trend in the UK

AI Model Optimisation
Daily Rate Trend

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

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

AI Model Optimisation
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing AI Model Optimisation over the 6 months to 30 August 2026.

Daily rate histogram for AI Model Optimisation in the UK

AI Model Optimisation
Top 9 Contract Job Locations

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 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
England -113 7 £600 -4.00% 40
UK excluding London -92 5 £556 +11.10% 17
London -83 4 £575 -8.00% 31
Work from Home -57 3 £525 - 16
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
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities 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 (13.33%) Apache
1 2 (13.33%) Apache Airflow
Cloud Services
1 6 (40.00%) AWS
2 4 (26.67%) Serverless
3 3 (20.00%) Amazon Bedrock
3 3 (20.00%) Amazon ECS
3 3 (20.00%) Amazon EKS
3 3 (20.00%) Amazon S3
3 3 (20.00%) AWS Lambda
4 2 (13.33%) Amazon CloudWatch
4 2 (13.33%) Amazon SQS
4 2 (13.33%) Azure
4 2 (13.33%) Dagster
4 2 (13.33%) GCP
5 1 (6.67%) Amazon EMR
5 1 (6.67%) Amazon SageMaker
5 1 (6.67%) Azure AI
5 1 (6.67%) n8n
5 1 (6.67%) Vertex AI
Communications & Networking
1 2 (13.33%) HTTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1 (6.67%) Amazon Redshift
1 1 (6.67%) Data Warehouse
1 1 (6.67%) Delta Lake
1 1 (6.67%) DynamoDB
1 1 (6.67%) Parquet
1 1 (6.67%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 2 (13.33%) MLflow
2 1 (6.67%) GitLab
General
1 1 (6.67%) Analytical Skills
1 1 (6.67%) Health Technology
1 1 (6.67%) Legal
1 1 (6.67%) Retail
1 1 (6.67%) Retail Finance
1 1 (6.67%) Social Skills
Job Titles
1 5 (33.33%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
1 5 (33.33%) Senior
2 4 (26.67%) Data Scientist
2 4 (26.67%) Senior Data Scientist
3 2 (13.33%) Automation Engineer
3 2 (13.33%) Python Engineer
4 1 (6.67%) Agentic Artificial Intelligence Engineer
4 1 (6.67%) Artificial Intelligence Specialist
4 1 (6.67%) AWS Engineer
4 1 (6.67%) Computer Engineer
4 1 (6.67%) Computer Vision Engineer
4 1 (6.67%) Credit Risk Modeller
4 1 (6.67%) Data Engineer
4 1 (6.67%) Deployment Engineer
4 1 (6.67%) Gen AI Engineer
4 1 (6.67%) Lead
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 3 (20.00%) AWS CDK
1 3 (20.00%) Hugging Face
1 3 (20.00%) pytest
1 3 (20.00%) PyTorch
2 2 (13.33%) boto
2 2 (13.33%) FastAPI
2 2 (13.33%) JWT
2 2 (13.33%) LangChain
2 2 (13.33%) NumPy
2 2 (13.33%) OAuth
2 2 (13.33%) OpenCV
2 2 (13.33%) Pandas
2 2 (13.33%) REST
2 2 (13.33%) SQLAlchemy
2 2 (13.33%) TensorFlow
3 1 (6.67%) CrewAI
3 1 (6.67%) LangGraph
3 1 (6.67%) Model Context Protocol
3 1 (6.67%) PySpark
3 1 (6.67%) Terraform
Miscellaneous
1 3 (20.00%) AI Agents
2 2 (13.33%) Algorithms
2 2 (13.33%) Data Structures
3 1 (6.67%) Credit Risk
3 1 (6.67%) Distributed Computing
3 1 (6.67%) Distributed Systems
Processes & Methodologies
1 15 (100.00%) AI
2 12 (80.00%) LLM
3 11 (73.33%) Machine Learning
4 9 (60.00%) Generative AI
5 7 (46.67%) Data Science
5 7 (46.67%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
6 5 (33.33%) Feature Engineering
6 5 (33.33%) Prompt Engineering
7 4 (26.67%) Clean Code
7 4 (26.67%) Data Acquisition
7 4 (26.67%) Technical Leadership
7 4 (26.67%) Validation
8 3 (20.00%) Computer Vision
8 3 (20.00%) Containerisation
8 3 (20.00%) ETL
8 3 (20.00%) Infrastructure as Code
8 3 (20.00%) Problem-Solving
8 3 (20.00%) Roadmaps
8 3 (20.00%) Workflow
9 2 (13.33%) Artificial Intelligence Engineering
Programming Languages
1 11 (73.33%) Python
2 2 (13.33%) SQL
3 1 (6.67%) JavaScript
3 1 (6.67%) TypeScript
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (13.33%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 1 (6.67%) Docker
Systems Management
1 2 (13.33%) Grafana
1 2 (13.33%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 1 (6.67%) Foundry
1 1 (6.67%) Microsoft
1 1 (6.67%) NVIDIA