Principal Engineer Job Trends in the East of England

Principal Engineer
England > East of England

The median Principal Engineer salary in the East of England is £85,000 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 17 September 2025.

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

6 months to
17 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 162 102 146
Rank change year-on-year -60 +44 +49
Permanent jobs requiring a Principal Engineer 14 72 5
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the East of England 0.41% 1.62% 0.19%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.45% 1.72% 0.21%
Number of salaries quoted 6 10 4
10th Percentile £60,625 £60,625 £58,250
25th Percentile £75,225 £61,563 £70,625
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £85,000 £70,000 £82,500
Median % change year-on-year +21.43% -15.15% +37.50%
75th Percentile £98,750 - £90,000
90th Percentile £100,000 - £94,500
England median annual salary £80,000 £75,000 £87,500
% change year-on-year +6.67% -14.29% +2.94%

All Permanent IT Job Vacancies
East of England

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent IT job vacancies in the East of England. 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 permanent jobs in our overall sample.

Permanent vacancies in the East of England with a recognized job title 3,140 4,198 2,331
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 92.63% 94.42% 90.67%
Number of salaries quoted 1,758 2,494 1,479
10th Percentile £27,000 £27,157 £25,250
25th Percentile £32,500 £35,000 £34,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £45,000 £50,000 £52,500
Median % change year-on-year -10.00% -4.76% +5.00%
75th Percentile £60,000 £65,000 £67,500
90th Percentile £75,000 £80,000 £80,000
England median annual salary £55,000 £55,000 £60,000
% change year-on-year - -8.33% -

Principal Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in the East of England

Job postings that featured Principal Engineer in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in the East of England.

Job vacancy trend for Principal Engineer in the East of England

Principal Engineer
Salary Trend in the East of England

Salary distribution trend for Principal Engineer job vacancies in the East of England.

Salary distribution trend for Principal Engineer job vacancies in the East of England

Principal Engineer
Salary Histogram in the East of England

Salary distribution for jobs citing Principal Engineer in the East of England over the 6 months to 17 September 2025.

Salary histogram for Principal Engineer in the East of England

Principal Engineer
Job Locations in the East of England

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Principal Engineer within the East of England region over the 6 months to 17 September 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
Permanent
IT Job Ads
Median Salary
Past 6 Months
Median Salary
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
Cambridgeshire +24 8 £85,000 - 10
Essex -19 3 £75,900 +8.43% 8
Hertfordshire -23 3 £100,000 +81.82% 10
Principal Engineer
England

Principal Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the East of England

For the 6 months to 17 September 2025, Principal Engineer 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 permanent job ads across the East of England region featuring Principal Engineer in the job title.

1 6 (42.86%) Retail
2 4 (28.57%) Software Engineering
3 3 (21.43%) Electronics
3 3 (21.43%) AWS
3 3 (21.43%) Kafka
3 3 (21.43%) Machine Learning
3 3 (21.43%) Microservices
3 3 (21.43%) Kubernetes
3 3 (21.43%) React
3 3 (21.43%) Cloud Native
3 3 (21.43%) Event-Driven
3 3 (21.43%) CI/CD
3 3 (21.43%) Architectural Patterns
3 3 (21.43%) Distributed Systems
4 2 (14.29%) PCI DSS
4 2 (14.29%) Batch Processing
4 2 (14.29%) Hugging Face
4 2 (14.29%) LLM
4 2 (14.29%) Amazon Bedrock
4 2 (14.29%) Azure AKS
4 2 (14.29%) Amazon EventBridge
4 2 (14.29%) Containerisation
4 2 (14.29%) AWS Certified Developer
4 2 (14.29%) AWS Step Functions
4 2 (14.29%) Nuxt
4 2 (14.29%) Observability
4 2 (14.29%) SOC 2
4 2 (14.29%) Amazon EKS
4 2 (14.29%) OpenAI
4 2 (14.29%) GDPR

Principal Engineer Skill Set
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the East of England 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:

Business Applications
1 1 (7.14%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 3 (21.43%) AWS
2 2 (14.29%) Amazon Bedrock
2 2 (14.29%) Amazon EKS
2 2 (14.29%) Amazon EventBridge
2 2 (14.29%) Amazon Kinesis
2 2 (14.29%) Amazon SQS
2 2 (14.29%) AWS Lambda
2 2 (14.29%) AWS Step Functions
2 2 (14.29%) Azure AKS
2 2 (14.29%) Serverless
3 1 (7.14%) Amazon ECS
3 1 (7.14%) SaaS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 2 (14.29%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 2 (14.29%) Rational DOORS
2 1 (7.14%) GitLab
General
1 6 (42.86%) Retail
2 3 (21.43%) Electronics
3 1 (7.14%) Analytical Skills
3 1 (7.14%) Manufacturing
3 1 (7.14%) Social Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 3 (21.43%) Kafka
1 3 (21.43%) React
2 2 (14.29%) AngularJS
2 2 (14.29%) Hugging Face
2 2 (14.29%) Node.js
2 2 (14.29%) Nuxt
2 2 (14.29%) RabbitMQ
2 2 (14.29%) Vue
3 1 (7.14%) Micronaut
3 1 (7.14%) Spring
3 1 (7.14%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 3 (21.43%) Cloud Native
1 3 (21.43%) Distributed Systems
2 2 (14.29%) Algorithms
3 1 (7.14%) Analytical Mindset
3 1 (7.14%) Life Science
3 1 (7.14%) Renewable Energy
3 1 (7.14%) Verilog
3 1 (7.14%) VHDL
Processes & Methodologies
1 4 (28.57%) Software Engineering
2 3 (21.43%) Architectural Patterns
2 3 (21.43%) CI/CD
2 3 (21.43%) Event-Driven
2 3 (21.43%) Machine Learning
2 3 (21.43%) Microservices
3 2 (14.29%) Analytics
3 2 (14.29%) API Integration
3 2 (14.29%) Artificial Intelligence
3 2 (14.29%) Batch Processing
3 2 (14.29%) Containerisation
3 2 (14.29%) Data Analytics
3 2 (14.29%) Data Science
3 2 (14.29%) Event-Driven Architecture
3 2 (14.29%) LLM
3 2 (14.29%) Observability
3 2 (14.29%) Signal Processing
3 2 (14.29%) Systems Engineering
3 2 (14.29%) Technical Leadership
3 2 (14.29%) Test Planning
Programming Languages
1 2 (14.29%) Python
2 1 (7.14%) C
2 1 (7.14%) C++
2 1 (7.14%) Java
2 1 (7.14%) JavaScript
2 1 (7.14%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 2 (14.29%) AWS Certification
1 2 (14.29%) AWS Certified Developer
1 2 (14.29%) BPSS Clearance
2 1 (7.14%) Degree
2 1 (7.14%) HNC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (14.29%) GDPR
1 2 (14.29%) ISO/IEC 15288
1 2 (14.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
1 2 (14.29%) PCI DSS
1 2 (14.29%) SOC 2
2 1 (7.14%) Data Quality
System Software
1 1 (7.14%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 3 (21.43%) Kubernetes
2 1 (7.14%) Istio
2 1 (7.14%) Terraform
Vendors
1 2 (14.29%) IBM
1 2 (14.29%) OpenAI
2 1 (7.14%) SAP