Principal Engineer Contract Job Trends in West London

Principal Engineer
London > West London

The median Principal Engineer daily rate in West London is £625, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 26 November 2025.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
26 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 41 30 -
Rank change year-on-year -11 - -
Contract jobs requiring a Principal Engineer 4 4 0
As % of all contract jobs in West London 1.38% 1.78% -
As % of the Job Titles category 1.67% 1.89% -
Number of daily rates quoted 4 4 0
10th Percentile £598 - -
25th Percentile £607 £563 -
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £625 £588 -
Median % change year-on-year +6.38% - -
75th Percentile £628 £633 -
90th Percentile £634 £646 -
London median daily rate £620 £825 £700
% change year-on-year -24.85% +17.86% -22.22%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
West London

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in West London. 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 West London with a recognized job title 240 212 443
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 82.76% 94.22% 95.68%
Number of daily rates quoted 145 156 348
10th Percentile £204 £240 £189
25th Percentile £350 £363 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £425 £450 £533
Median % change year-on-year -5.56% -15.49% +5.37%
75th Percentile £500 £550 £613
90th Percentile £608 £613 £700
London median daily rate £535 £550 £563
% change year-on-year -2.73% -2.22% -2.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 17 12 22
10th Percentile £19.54 £20.75 £18.88
25th Percentile £21.46 £22.88 £31.25
Median hourly rate £25.00 £24.90 £55.25
Median % change year-on-year +0.40% -54.93% +72.66%
75th Percentile £34.27 £32.63 £70.75
90th Percentile £44.50 £54.28 £84.00
London median hourly rate £26.78 £37.50 £36.33
% change year-on-year -28.59% +3.22% +3.80%

Principal Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in West London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Principal Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in West London.

Principal Engineer job vacancy trend in West London

Principal Engineer
Daily Rate Trend in West London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Principal Engineer job vacancies in West London.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Principal Engineer job vacancies in West London

Principal Engineer
Contract Job Locations in West London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Principal Engineer within the West London region over the 6 months to 26 November 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
Richmond upon Thames -3 4 £625 +6.38%
Principal Engineer
London

Principal Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in West London

For the 6 months to 26 November 2025, Principal Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the West London region featuring Principal Engineer in the job title.

1 4 (100.00%) Analytics
1 4 (100.00%) Apache Spark
1 4 (100.00%) AWS
1 4 (100.00%) Azure
1 4 (100.00%) CI/CD
1 4 (100.00%) Data Architecture
1 4 (100.00%) Data Engineering
1 4 (100.00%) Data Lake
1 4 (100.00%) Data Quality
1 4 (100.00%) Databricks
1 4 (100.00%) GCP
1 4 (100.00%) Kafka
1 4 (100.00%) Observability
1 4 (100.00%) Python
1 4 (100.00%) Software Engineering
1 4 (100.00%) Terraform
2 2 (50.00%) Actionable Insight
2 2 (50.00%) AI
2 2 (50.00%) Amazon Athena
2 2 (50.00%) Amazon S3
2 2 (50.00%) Amazon SQS
2 2 (50.00%) Apache
2 2 (50.00%) Architecture Governance
2 2 (50.00%) AWS CloudFormation
2 2 (50.00%) Azure Synapse Analytics
2 2 (50.00%) Batch Processing
2 2 (50.00%) BigQuery
2 2 (50.00%) Business Intelligence
2 2 (50.00%) C#
2 2 (50.00%) Collibra

Principal Engineer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in West 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 4 (100.00%) Apache Spark
2 2 (50.00%) Apache
Cloud Services
1 4 (100.00%) AWS
1 4 (100.00%) Azure
1 4 (100.00%) GCP
2 2 (50.00%) Amazon S3
2 2 (50.00%) Amazon SQS
2 2 (50.00%) AWS CloudFormation
2 2 (50.00%) Azure Synapse Analytics
2 2 (50.00%) Collibra
2 2 (50.00%) Power Platform
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (100.00%) Data Lake
2 2 (50.00%) Amazon Athena
2 2 (50.00%) BigQuery
2 2 (50.00%) Metadata
2 2 (50.00%) Mixpanel
2 2 (50.00%) OLAP
2 2 (50.00%) OLTP
2 2 (50.00%) Power BI
General
1 2 (50.00%) Influencing Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 4 (100.00%) Kafka
2 2 (50.00%) Great Expectations
2 2 (50.00%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 2 (50.00%) Cloud Native
Processes & Methodologies
1 4 (100.00%) Analytics
1 4 (100.00%) CI/CD
1 4 (100.00%) Data Architecture
1 4 (100.00%) Data Engineering
1 4 (100.00%) Observability
1 4 (100.00%) Software Engineering
2 2 (50.00%) Actionable Insight
2 2 (50.00%) Architecture Governance
2 2 (50.00%) Batch Processing
2 2 (50.00%) Data Analytics
2 2 (50.00%) Data Pipeline
2 2 (50.00%) Data Privacy
2 2 (50.00%) Data Strategy
2 2 (50.00%) DevOps
2 2 (50.00%) Infrastructure as Code
2 2 (50.00%) LLM
2 2 (50.00%) Machine Learning
2 2 (50.00%) MapReduce
2 2 (50.00%) Mentoring
2 2 (50.00%) Problem-Solving
Programming Languages
1 4 (100.00%) Python
2 2 (50.00%) C#
2 2 (50.00%) SQL
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (100.00%) Data Quality
2 2 (50.00%) GDPR
Systems Management
1 4 (100.00%) Terraform
Vendors
1 4 (100.00%) Databricks
2 2 (50.00%) Google