Lead Data Engineer Contracts

Lead Data Engineer
UK

The median Lead Data Engineer daily rate in the UK is £500, 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 478 534 669
Rank change year-on-year +56 +135 +87
Contract jobs requiring a Lead Data Engineer 42 48 49
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.14% 0.11% 0.082%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.16% 0.12% 0.087%
Number of daily rates quoted 31 39 35
10th Percentile £375 £485 £400
25th Percentile £436 £513 £544
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £600 £650
Median % change year-on-year -16.67% -7.69% +4.00%
75th Percentile £600 £722 £750
90th Percentile £800 £800 £780
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £610 £545
% change year-on-year -26.23% +11.93% -0.91%

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%

Lead Data Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Job vacancy trend for Lead Data Engineer in the UK

Lead Data Engineer
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

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

Daily rate trend for Lead Data Engineer in the UK

Lead Data Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram

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

Daily rate histogram for Lead Data Engineer in the UK

Lead Data Engineer
Top 10 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Lead 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 +49 35 £500 -14.89% 49
London +32 28 £500 -14.89% 33
Work from Home +26 16 £513 -17.67% 32
UK excluding London +64 7 £450 -26.23% 23
North of England +17 2 £550 -2.22% 6
North East +1 2 £550 +15.30%
Midlands - 2 £550 - 1
Wales - 2 £206 - 1
West Midlands - 2 £550 - 1
South East +45 1 £525 -15.32% 12

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

For the 6 months to 1 May 2025, Lead 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 Lead Data Engineer in the job title.

1 30 (71.43%) SQL
2 25 (59.52%) Python
3 23 (54.76%) Data Engineering
4 21 (50.00%) AWS
5 20 (47.62%) Data Pipeline
6 18 (42.86%) Analytics
7 16 (38.10%) Data Modelling
7 16 (38.10%) SC Cleared
7 16 (38.10%) Security Cleared
8 15 (35.71%) ETL
9 14 (33.33%) Azure
9 14 (33.33%) CI/CD
10 13 (30.95%) Databricks
11 12 (28.57%) Data Lake
12 11 (26.19%) DevOps
12 11 (26.19%) Mentoring
13 10 (23.81%) Data Governance
13 10 (23.81%) Power BI
13 10 (23.81%) Power Platform
14 9 (21.43%) dbt
14 9 (21.43%) Public Sector
14 9 (21.43%) Data Quality
14 9 (21.43%) GitHub
15 8 (19.05%) Data Architecture
15 8 (19.05%) Migration
15 8 (19.05%) Apache Airflow
16 7 (16.67%) PySpark
16 7 (16.67%) Technical Leadership
16 7 (16.67%) GitHub Actions
16 7 (16.67%) Agile

Lead 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 8 (19.05%) Apache Airflow
2 7 (16.67%) Apache
2 7 (16.67%) Apache Spark
3 1 (2.38%) Drupal
Business Applications
1 1 (2.38%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 21 (50.00%) AWS
2 14 (33.33%) Azure
3 10 (23.81%) Power Platform
4 9 (21.43%) dbt
4 9 (21.43%) GitHub
5 7 (16.67%) GitHub Actions
6 6 (14.29%) AWS Lambda
6 6 (14.29%) Azure Data Factory
6 6 (14.29%) Serverless
7 5 (11.90%) Amazon S3
8 4 (9.52%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 4 (9.52%) Azure Machine Learning
8 4 (9.52%) GCP
9 3 (7.14%) Azure DevOps
9 3 (7.14%) Snowflake
10 2 (4.76%) PaaS
11 1 (2.38%) Amazon EC2
11 1 (2.38%) Amazon Kinesis
11 1 (2.38%) SaaS
11 1 (2.38%) Sumo Logic
Database & Business Intelligence
1 12 (28.57%) Data Lake
2 10 (23.81%) Power BI
3 7 (16.67%) Big Data
4 6 (14.29%) Data Warehouse
5 4 (9.52%) Amazon RDS
5 4 (9.52%) Neo4j
5 4 (9.52%) Relational Database
6 3 (7.14%) Flink
6 3 (7.14%) Metadata
6 3 (7.14%) Oracle Database
6 3 (7.14%) PostgreSQL
6 3 (7.14%) Tableau
7 2 (4.76%) Amazon Athena
7 2 (4.76%) Amazon Redshift
7 2 (4.76%) BigQuery
7 2 (4.76%) Metadata Repository
7 2 (4.76%) Snowflake Schema
7 2 (4.76%) Spark SQL
7 2 (4.76%) Star Schema
8 1 (2.38%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 6 (14.29%) Git
2 2 (4.76%) JIRA
3 1 (2.38%) Liquibase
General
1 9 (21.43%) Public Sector
2 4 (9.52%) Analytical Skills
3 3 (7.14%) Finance
4 2 (4.76%) Social Skills
5 1 (2.38%) Automotive
5 1 (2.38%) Banking
5 1 (2.38%) Front Office
5 1 (2.38%) Investment Banking
5 1 (2.38%) Law
5 1 (2.38%) Legal
5 1 (2.38%) Manufacturing
5 1 (2.38%) Retail
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 7 (16.67%) Jinja
1 7 (16.67%) PySpark
2 4 (9.52%) pytest
2 4 (9.52%) React
3 3 (7.14%) Kafka
3 3 (7.14%) Plotly
4 2 (4.76%) .NET
5 1 (2.38%) Lambda Expressions
5 1 (2.38%) REST
5 1 (2.38%) RESTful
5 1 (2.38%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 3 (7.14%) Data Structures
2 2 (4.76%) Cloud Native
3 1 (2.38%) Data Protection Act
3 1 (2.38%) Greenfield Project
3 1 (2.38%) Life Science
3 1 (2.38%) NHS
3 1 (2.38%) Onboarding
3 1 (2.38%) Reference Data
3 1 (2.38%) Team-Oriented Environment
Processes & Methodologies
1 23 (54.76%) Data Engineering
2 20 (47.62%) Data Pipeline
3 18 (42.86%) Analytics
4 16 (38.10%) Data Modelling
5 15 (35.71%) ETL
6 14 (33.33%) CI/CD
7 11 (26.19%) DevOps
7 11 (26.19%) Mentoring
8 10 (23.81%) Data Governance
9 8 (19.05%) Data Architecture
9 8 (19.05%) Migration
10 7 (16.67%) Agile
10 7 (16.67%) Technical Leadership
11 6 (14.29%) Business Intelligence
11 6 (14.29%) Data Integration
11 6 (14.29%) Data Science
11 6 (14.29%) Dimensional Modelling
11 6 (14.29%) Test Automation
12 5 (11.90%) Machine Learning
12 5 (11.90%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 30 (71.43%) SQL
2 25 (59.52%) Python
3 5 (11.90%) R
4 4 (9.52%) JavaScript
5 3 (7.14%) Scala
6 1 (2.38%) Java
6 1 (2.38%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 16 (38.10%) SC Cleared
1 16 (38.10%) Security Cleared
2 5 (11.90%) AWS Certification
3 4 (9.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
4 3 (7.14%) Degree
5 2 (4.76%) Azure Certification
5 2 (4.76%) Computer Science Degree
6 1 (2.38%) Master's Degree
6 1 (2.38%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 9 (21.43%) Data Quality
2 1 (2.38%) QA
Systems Management
1 5 (11.90%) Terraform
2 2 (4.76%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 13 (30.95%) Databricks
2 7 (16.67%) Oracle
3 5 (11.90%) Microsoft
4 4 (9.52%) Google
5 1 (2.38%) Cloudera
5 1 (2.38%) Foundry
5 1 (2.38%) Hitachi
5 1 (2.38%) New Relic
5 1 (2.38%) Palantir
5 1 (2.38%) SAP
5 1 (2.38%) Sparx