Big Data Engineer Contracts

Big Data Engineer
UK

The median Big Data Engineer daily rate in the UK is £411, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 1 May 2025.

The table below provides contractor rate benchmarking and summary statistics, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 505 560 673
Rank change year-on-year +55 +113 +61
Contract jobs requiring a Big Data Engineer 15 22 45
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.051% 0.051% 0.075%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.055% 0.054% 0.080%
Number of daily rates quoted 6 20 40
10th Percentile £316 £625 £500
25th Percentile £364 £650 £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £411 £800 £650
Median % change year-on-year -48.59% +23.08% -
75th Percentile £508 £850 £775
90th Percentile £619 - £784
UK excluding London median daily rate £410 £475 £774
% change year-on-year -13.68% -38.63% +10.57%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
UK

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in the UK with a recognized job title 27,084 40,415 56,464
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.52% 92.78% 94.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,692 26,309 39,470
10th Percentile £300 £275 £313
25th Percentile £406 £410 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -1.90% -2.78% +2.86%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £492 £500
% change year-on-year -3.46% -1.60% +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,035 2,664 1,570
10th Percentile £14.07 £12.86 £14.29
25th Percentile £18.50 £16.30 £19.50
Median hourly rate £29.00 £36.42 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -20.37% -19.07% +91.49%
75th Percentile £62.50 £60.75 £65.75
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.50 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £28.00 £39.55 £42.50
% change year-on-year -29.20% -6.94% +117.95%

Big Data Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings that featured Big Data Engineer in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Big Data Engineer in the UK

Big Data Engineer
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Big Data Engineer.

Daily rate trend for Big Data Engineer in the UK

Big Data Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Big Data Engineer over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Big Data Engineer in the UK

Big Data Engineer
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Big Data Engineer.

Hourly rate trend for Big Data Engineer in the UK

Big Data Engineer
Top 8 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Big Data Engineer within the UK over the 6 months to 1 May 2025. 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 +51 15 £411 -48.59% 2
London +29 11 £413 -48.44% 2
Work from Home +32 6 £381 -52.34% 3
UK excluding London +65 4 £410 -13.68%
Midlands - 3 £349 -
East Midlands - 2 £349 -
South East - 1 £700 -
West Midlands - 1 - -

Big Data Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities

For the 6 months to 1 May 2025, Big Data Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads featuring Big Data Engineer in the job title.

1 15 (100.00%) Big Data
2 11 (73.33%) Apache Spark
3 10 (66.67%) Java
4 9 (60.00%) Python
5 8 (53.33%) Distributed Computing
6 7 (46.67%) Machine Learning
7 6 (40.00%) Deep Learning
7 6 (40.00%) Low Latency
7 6 (40.00%) C++
8 5 (33.33%) ETL
8 5 (33.33%) Finance
8 5 (33.33%) Hadoop
9 4 (26.67%) Tandem
9 4 (26.67%) Shell Script
9 4 (26.67%) Artificial Intelligence
9 4 (26.67%) C
9 4 (26.67%) Data Mining
9 4 (26.67%) Parallel Computing
9 4 (26.67%) Pattern Recognition
9 4 (26.67%) Roadmaps
9 4 (26.67%) Ray
9 4 (26.67%) Technical Leadership
9 4 (26.67%) Technical Debt
10 3 (20.00%) Data Science
10 3 (20.00%) Performance Tuning
10 3 (20.00%) Apache
10 3 (20.00%) AWS
11 2 (13.33%) Scala
11 2 (13.33%) Software Engineering
11 2 (13.33%) Google

Big Data Engineer Skill Set
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 11 (73.33%) Apache Spark
2 3 (20.00%) Apache
Cloud Services
1 3 (20.00%) AWS
2 2 (13.33%) GCP
3 1 (6.67%) Amazon S3
3 1 (6.67%) AWS Lambda
3 1 (6.67%) Azure
3 1 (6.67%) Cloud Composer
3 1 (6.67%) Serverless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 15 (100.00%) Big Data
2 5 (33.33%) Hadoop
3 4 (26.67%) Data Mining
4 2 (13.33%) Apache Hive
4 2 (13.33%) BigQuery
4 2 (13.33%) Data Lake
4 2 (13.33%) Data Warehouse
4 2 (13.33%) HBase
4 2 (13.33%) Impala
5 1 (6.67%) Amazon RDS
5 1 (6.67%) Bigtable
5 1 (6.67%) Cloud Spanner
5 1 (6.67%) DataStage
5 1 (6.67%) DB2
5 1 (6.67%) NoSQL
5 1 (6.67%) RDBMS
5 1 (6.67%) Relational Database
General
1 5 (33.33%) Finance
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 4 (26.67%) Ray
2 2 (13.33%) Kafka
2 2 (13.33%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 8 (53.33%) Distributed Computing
2 4 (26.67%) Tandem
3 1 (6.67%) Onboarding
Processes & Methodologies
1 7 (46.67%) Machine Learning
2 6 (40.00%) Deep Learning
2 6 (40.00%) Low Latency
3 5 (33.33%) ETL
4 4 (26.67%) Artificial Intelligence
4 4 (26.67%) Parallel Computing
4 4 (26.67%) Pattern Recognition
4 4 (26.67%) Roadmaps
4 4 (26.67%) Technical Debt
4 4 (26.67%) Technical Leadership
5 3 (20.00%) Data Science
5 3 (20.00%) Performance Tuning
6 2 (13.33%) CI/CD
6 2 (13.33%) Computer Science
6 2 (13.33%) Data Engineering
6 2 (13.33%) Data Modelling
6 2 (13.33%) Data Pipeline
6 2 (13.33%) Data Transformation
6 2 (13.33%) DevOps
6 2 (13.33%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 10 (66.67%) Java
2 9 (60.00%) Python
3 6 (40.00%) C++
4 4 (26.67%) C
4 4 (26.67%) Shell Script
5 2 (13.33%) Scala
5 2 (13.33%) SQL
6 1 (6.67%) Bash
6 1 (6.67%) Rust
Qualifications
1 2 (13.33%) Computer Science Degree
1 2 (13.33%) Degree
1 2 (13.33%) Master's Degree
1 2 (13.33%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (6.67%) Data Quality
System Software
1 1 (6.67%) Docker
Systems Management
1 2 (13.33%) Ansible
1 2 (13.33%) Kubernetes
1 2 (13.33%) Terraform
2 1 (6.67%) Argo
2 1 (6.67%) Grafana
2 1 (6.67%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 2 (13.33%) Databricks
1 2 (13.33%) Google
2 1 (6.67%) Ariba
2 1 (6.67%) SAP
2 1 (6.67%) Virgin Media