Data Engineering Job Trends

Data Engineering
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs requiring Data Engineering skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 16 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 130 149 158
Rank change year-on-year +19 +9 +50
Permanent jobs citing Data Engineering 1,643 1,063 1,309
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.44% 2.15% 1.68%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.97% 2.43% 2.07%
Number of salaries quoted 1,159 475 651
10th Percentile £46,217 £46,000 £44,738
25th Percentile £56,000 £55,000 £56,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £80,000 £70,000 £71,991
Median % change year-on-year +14.29% -2.77% -4.01%
75th Percentile £100,000 £95,000 £92,500
90th Percentile £115,000 £112,500 £105,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £72,500 £65,000 £62,700
% change year-on-year +11.54% +3.67% -3.54%

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

Data Engineering falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 83,236 43,812 63,193
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 72.95% 88.75% 81.16%
Number of salaries quoted 57,755 24,707 35,897
10th Percentile £31,250 £28,500 £32,000
25th Percentile £41,750 £36,250 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,000 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £80,000 £75,000 £77,500
90th Percentile £100,000 £96,250 £95,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £47,500 £52,500
% change year-on-year +15.79% -9.52% -2.78%

Data Engineering
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing Data Engineering relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised.

Data Engineering job vacancy trend in the UK

Data Engineering
Salary Trend

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Engineering.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Engineering

Data Engineering
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing Data Engineering over the 6 months to 16 September 2026.

Salary histogram for Data Engineering in the UK

Data Engineering
Top 17 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Data Engineering within the UK over the 6 months to 16 September 2026. 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
England +21 1,522 £80,000 +14.29% 2,432
UK excluding London -14 809 £72,500 +11.54% 1,086
London +35 733 £90,000 +5.88% 1,585
Work from Home +10 522 £80,000 +13.48% 1,036
North of England -9 369 £75,000 +11.11% 308
North West -22 175 £80,000 +39.13% 190
South East -57 152 £70,000 +7.69% 233
Midlands +15 108 £75,000 +11.11% 131
Yorkshire +4 99 £75,000 +7.14% 79
North East +15 95 £66,805 +40.64% 40
South West -18 84 £62,500 +4.17% 118
West Midlands -7 74 £75,000 +25.00% 106
East of England -20 42 £70,000 +40.00% 77
East Midlands -17 34 £77,500 +13.97% 25
Scotland -9 30 £100,000 +37.93% 127
Wales -50 27 £63,500 +26.69% 21
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 73

Data Engineering
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities 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
1 173 (10.53%) Apache Spark
2 140 (8.52%) Apache Airflow
3 126 (7.67%) Apache
4 22 (1.34%) Palantir Foundry
5 20 (1.22%) Jupyter
6 13 (0.79%) SAS
7 10 (0.61%) SharePoint
8 9 (0.55%) Confluence
8 9 (0.55%) Oracle Workflow
9 4 (0.24%) Luigi
10 2 (0.12%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.12%) Tornado
11 1 (0.061%) Adobe Experience Manager
11 1 (0.061%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.061%) CMS
11 1 (0.061%) GeoServer
11 1 (0.061%) Moodle
Applications
1 19 (1.16%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.49%) Spreadsheet
3 3 (0.18%) MS Visio
4 2 (0.12%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.061%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.061%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 5 (0.30%) IBM Planning Analytics
2 4 (0.24%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.12%) SAP Business One
4 1 (0.061%) Academy Revenues and Benefits
4 1 (0.061%) FastStats
4 1 (0.061%) Infor M3
4 1 (0.061%) NetSuite
4 1 (0.061%) Oracle Assets
4 1 (0.061%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.061%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.061%) SAP SD
Cloud Services
1 679 (41.33%) Azure
2 478 (29.09%) AWS
3 287 (17.47%) Power Platform
4 270 (16.43%) GCP
5 212 (12.90%) Snowflake
6 180 (10.96%) Azure Data Factory
7 149 (9.07%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 135 (8.22%) dbt
9 99 (6.03%) Amazon S3
10 98 (5.96%) Serverless
11 96 (5.84%) Azure DevOps
12 82 (4.99%) Azure Machine Learning
13 67 (4.08%) Azure AI
14 66 (4.02%) AWS Lambda
15 64 (3.90%) GitHub
16 63 (3.83%) SaaS
17 51 (3.10%) Amazon EMR
18 48 (2.92%) Azure Databricks
19 43 (2.62%) Microsoft Purview
20 41 (2.50%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 18 (1.10%) Broadband
2 7 (0.43%) Internet
3 4 (0.24%) 5G
4 2 (0.12%) Firewall
4 2 (0.12%) HTTP
4 2 (0.12%) MQTT
5 1 (0.061%) 4G
5 1 (0.061%) ATM
5 1 (0.061%) DAB
5 1 (0.061%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 297 (18.08%) Data Warehouse
2 277 (16.86%) Power BI
3 224 (13.63%) Data Lake
4 133 (8.09%) SQL Server
5 114 (6.94%) BigQuery
6 111 (6.76%) Amazon Redshift
7 108 (6.57%) Tableau
8 101 (6.15%) Metadata
9 85 (5.17%) Big Data
10 69 (4.20%) Azure SQL Database
11 64 (3.90%) NoSQL
12 59 (3.59%) Semantic Layer
13 58 (3.53%) Relational Database
14 56 (3.41%) Delta Lake
14 56 (3.41%) Star Schema
15 52 (3.16%) PostgreSQL
16 50 (3.04%) Amazon Athena
17 48 (2.92%) Spark SQL
18 42 (2.56%) Looker
19 39 (2.37%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 120 (7.30%) Git
2 35 (2.13%) Jenkins
3 23 (1.40%) GitLab
4 19 (1.16%) JIRA
4 19 (1.16%) MLflow
5 10 (0.61%) Claude Code
6 5 (0.30%) Poetry
7 4 (0.24%) Selenium
7 4 (0.24%) Visual Studio Code
8 3 (0.18%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.18%) Octopus Deploy
9 2 (0.12%) ERwin
9 2 (0.12%) RStudio
9 2 (0.12%) VSS/SourceSafe
10 1 (0.061%) kappa
10 1 (0.061%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 1 (0.061%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.061%) Yeoman
General
1 432 (26.29%) Finance
2 409 (24.89%) Social Skills
3 284 (17.29%) Analytical Skills
4 141 (8.58%) Public Sector
5 108 (6.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 72 (4.38%) Banking
7 60 (3.65%) Retail
8 53 (3.23%) Marketing
9 46 (2.80%) Legal
10 38 (2.31%) Influencing Skills
11 37 (2.25%) Law
12 31 (1.89%) Financial Institution
13 26 (1.58%) Manufacturing
14 21 (1.28%) Advertising
15 13 (0.79%) Games
15 13 (0.79%) Presentation Skills
16 12 (0.73%) Aerospace
16 12 (0.73%) Organisational Skills
17 10 (0.61%) Police
18 9 (0.55%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 639 (38.89%) Data Engineer
2 365 (22.22%) Senior
3 295 (17.95%) Lead
4 188 (11.44%) Senior Data Engineer
5 141 (8.58%) Architect
6 115 (7.00%) Data Manager
7 100 (6.09%) Data Architect
8 95 (5.78%) Lead Data Engineer
9 73 (4.44%) Engineering Manager
9 73 (4.44%) Principal Engineer
10 71 (4.32%) Analyst
11 69 (4.20%) Developer
12 61 (3.71%) Consultant
13 56 (3.41%) Software Engineer
14 55 (3.35%) Databricks Engineer
15 46 (2.80%) Head of Engineering
16 45 (2.74%) Principal Data Engineer
17 44 (2.68%) Data Scientist
17 44 (2.68%) Databricks Data Engineer
18 42 (2.56%) Data Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 179 (10.89%) PySpark
2 123 (7.49%) Terraform
3 90 (5.48%) Kafka
4 41 (2.50%) LangChain
5 40 (2.43%) .NET
6 36 (2.19%) REST
7 35 (2.13%) PyTorch
7 35 (2.13%) scikit-learn
7 35 (2.13%) TensorFlow
8 34 (2.07%) LlamaIndex
9 28 (1.70%) Pandas
10 26 (1.58%) Node.js
11 23 (1.40%) SpaCy
12 22 (1.34%) JSON
13 20 (1.22%) pgvector
14 15 (0.91%) Apache NiFi
15 14 (0.85%) RESTful
16 11 (0.67%) FastAPI
16 11 (0.67%) React
16 11 (0.67%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 183 (11.14%) Cloud Native
2 67 (4.08%) Data Structures
3 61 (3.71%) Product Ownership
4 53 (3.23%) Distributed Systems
5 46 (2.80%) Onboarding
6 35 (2.13%) AI Agents
7 25 (1.52%) e-Learning
8 20 (1.22%) Self-Motivation
9 19 (1.16%) Analytical Mindset
9 19 (1.16%) Distributed Computing
10 18 (1.10%) Legacy Systems
10 18 (1.10%) Management Information System
10 18 (1.10%) Public Cloud
11 16 (0.97%) Clustering
11 16 (0.97%) Greenfield Project
11 16 (0.97%) Hedge funds
12 15 (0.91%) Hybrid Cloud
12 15 (0.91%) Low-Code
13 14 (0.85%) Distributed Architecture
13 14 (0.85%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 7 (0.43%) Windows
2 4 (0.24%) Linux
3 1 (0.061%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 778 (47.35%) Analytics
2 615 (37.43%) AI
3 581 (35.36%) Data Pipeline
4 505 (30.74%) Data Modelling
5 472 (28.73%) ETL
6 425 (25.87%) CI/CD
7 424 (25.81%) Business Intelligence
8 408 (24.83%) Data Governance
9 398 (24.22%) Decision-Making
10 395 (24.04%) Agile
11 391 (23.80%) Machine Learning
12 359 (21.85%) Data Architecture
13 310 (18.87%) Mentoring
14 304 (18.50%) DevOps
15 279 (16.98%) Data Science
16 265 (16.13%) Problem-Solving
17 243 (14.79%) Roadmaps
18 206 (12.54%) Lakehouse
19 205 (12.48%) Technical Leadership
20 185 (11.26%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 841 (51.19%) SQL
2 814 (49.54%) Python
3 124 (7.55%) Java
4 72 (4.38%) Scala
5 61 (3.71%) JavaScript
6 51 (3.10%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 35 (2.13%) C#
8 31 (1.89%) C++
9 29 (1.77%) TypeScript
10 27 (1.64%) R
11 19 (1.16%) Bash
12 15 (0.91%) T-SQL
13 13 (0.79%) PowerShell
14 11 (0.67%) Go
15 8 (0.49%) Bicep
16 7 (0.43%) Groovy
17 5 (0.30%) PL/SQL
17 5 (0.30%) VBA
18 4 (0.24%) Rust
19 3 (0.18%) Julia
Qualifications
1 171 (10.41%) Security Cleared
2 170 (10.35%) Degree
3 116 (7.06%) SC Cleared
4 55 (3.35%) Master's Degree
5 50 (3.04%) Computer Science Degree
6 44 (2.68%) Azure Certification
7 39 (2.37%) DV Cleared
8 29 (1.77%) DBS Check
9 28 (1.70%) BPSS Clearance
10 25 (1.52%) PhD
11 23 (1.40%) AWS Certification
12 15 (0.91%) ACCA
12 15 (0.91%) CIMA
13 12 (0.73%) Microsoft Certification
14 6 (0.37%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 6 (0.37%) Numerate Degree
15 4 (0.24%) CCA
16 3 (0.18%) CBAP
16 3 (0.18%) CISSP
16 3 (0.18%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 465 (28.30%) Data Quality
2 76 (4.63%) GDPR
3 58 (3.53%) Accessibility
4 33 (2.01%) QA
5 14 (0.85%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 11 (0.67%) GRC
7 9 (0.55%) Actionable Recommendations
8 7 (0.43%) NCSC
9 6 (0.37%) PERC
10 4 (0.24%) PMO
10 4 (0.24%) SLA
11 3 (0.18%) EU AI Act
11 3 (0.18%) PCI DSS
11 3 (0.18%) PSD2
12 2 (0.12%) ISO/IEC 42001
12 2 (0.12%) Solvency II
13 1 (0.061%) NIST
System Software
1 94 (5.72%) Docker
2 56 (3.41%) Virtual Machines
3 7 (0.43%) Active Directory
4 3 (0.18%) NDS
4 3 (0.18%) VMware Infrastructure
5 1 (0.061%) Apache Flume
5 1 (0.061%) Embedded Firmware
5 1 (0.061%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 63 (3.83%) Kubernetes
2 13 (0.79%) Grafana
3 5 (0.30%) Prometheus
4 4 (0.24%) Argo
5 3 (0.18%) Ansible
5 3 (0.18%) Kibana
5 3 (0.18%) Microsoft Intune
5 3 (0.18%) SCCM
6 2 (0.12%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
6 2 (0.12%) Computer Incident Response Team
7 1 (0.061%) CASB
Vendors
1 423 (25.75%) Databricks
2 313 (19.05%) Microsoft
3 90 (5.48%) Google
4 40 (2.43%) Oracle
5 33 (2.01%) Palantir
6 31 (1.89%) Informatica
7 30 (1.83%) Foundry
8 29 (1.77%) SAP
9 28 (1.70%) Dell
10 25 (1.52%) OpenAI
11 24 (1.46%) Salesforce
12 18 (1.10%) Cloudera
13 15 (0.91%) Teradata
14 12 (0.73%) Denodo
15 11 (0.67%) Sage
16 9 (0.55%) Alteryx
17 5 (0.30%) IBM
17 5 (0.30%) MicroStrategy
17 5 (0.30%) YouTube
18 4 (0.24%) Cognos