Hybrid/Remote AI Model Optimisation Contract Job Trends

AI Model Optimisation
UK > Work from Home

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for remote or hybrid contract work 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 361 304 335
Rank change year-on-year -57 +31 -
Contract jobs citing AI Model Optimisation 3 2 1
As % of all contract jobs with remote/hybrid work options 0.022% 0.020% 0.008%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.025% 0.022% 0.009%
Number of daily rates quoted 1 2 0
10th Percentile - £503 -
25th Percentile £513 £506 -
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 -
75th Percentile £538 £556 -
90th Percentile - £568 -
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
Work from Home

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 with remote or hybrid options requiring process or methodology skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 12,167 9,083 11,193
As % of all contract jobs with a WFH option 90.11% 92.06% 87.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,633 6,065 7,367
10th Percentile £356 £325 £325
25th Percentile £425 £413 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.96% -3.81% -2.33%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £715 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 711 279 333
10th Percentile £16.33 £12.62 £17.65
25th Percentile £30.11 £19.07 £30.12
Median hourly rate £47.50 £35.50 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +33.80% -17.44% -14.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £65.00 £66.61
90th Percentile £85.00 £68.55 £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 for Remote/Hybrid Jobs

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing AI Model Optimisation and offering remote or hybrid work options relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

AI Model Optimisation job vacancy trend for remote/hybrid jobs

AI Model Optimisation
Daily Rate Trend for Remote/Hybrid Jobs

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs with remote/hybrid work options citing AI Model Optimisation.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs with remote/hybrid work options citing AI Model Optimisation

AI Model Optimisation
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in Remote/Hybrid Jobs 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:

Cloud Services
1 2 (66.67%) Amazon Bedrock
1 2 (66.67%) AWS
2 1 (33.33%) Amazon EMR
2 1 (33.33%) Amazon S3
2 1 (33.33%) AWS Lambda
2 1 (33.33%) Serverless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1 (33.33%) Amazon Redshift
1 1 (33.33%) Data Warehouse
1 1 (33.33%) Delta Lake
1 1 (33.33%) DynamoDB
1 1 (33.33%) Parquet
1 1 (33.33%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 1 (33.33%) GitLab
General
1 1 (33.33%) Legal
Job Titles
1 1 (33.33%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
1 1 (33.33%) Artificial Intelligence Specialist
1 1 (33.33%) Data Engineer
1 1 (33.33%) Gen AI Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1 (33.33%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 1 (33.33%) AI Agents
1 1 (33.33%) Distributed Computing
1 1 (33.33%) Distributed Systems
Processes & Methodologies
1 3 (100.00%) AI
1 3 (100.00%) LLM
1 3 (100.00%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
2 2 (66.67%) Data Science
2 2 (66.67%) Generative AI
2 2 (66.67%) Machine Learning
2 2 (66.67%) Problem-Solving
3 1 (33.33%) Benchmarking
3 1 (33.33%) Change Data Capture
3 1 (33.33%) CI/CD
3 1 (33.33%) Coaching
3 1 (33.33%) Data Engineering
3 1 (33.33%) Data Pipeline
3 1 (33.33%) Data Protection
3 1 (33.33%) ETL
3 1 (33.33%) MLOps
3 1 (33.33%) Observability
3 1 (33.33%) Performance Tuning
3 1 (33.33%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 1 (33.33%) Python
1 1 (33.33%) SQL
Vendors
1 1 (33.33%) Foundry
1 1 (33.33%) Microsoft