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 26 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
26 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 134 146 153
Rank change year-on-year +12 +7 +49
Permanent jobs citing Data Engineering 1,639 1,042 1,315
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.40% 2.10% 1.72%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.91% 2.37% 2.11%
Number of salaries quoted 1,156 475 645
10th Percentile £46,217 £46,000 £42,500
25th Percentile £55,831 £55,000 £55,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £75,000 £70,000 £70,000
Median % change year-on-year +7.14% - -6.67%
75th Percentile £100,000 £95,000 £92,500
90th Percentile £111,875 £112,500 £105,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £70,000 £65,000 £62,500
% change year-on-year +7.69% +4.00% -3.85%

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 85,853 43,932 62,432
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.10% 88.75% 81.70%
Number of salaries quoted 59,280 24,639 34,370
10th Percentile £31,250 £28,500 £32,500
25th Percentile £41,585 £36,250 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,000 £57,965
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% -5.11% -3.39%
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 26 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 26 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 +16 1,512 £77,500 +10.71% 2,001
UK excluding London -16 813 £70,000 +7.69% 933
London +20 724 £85,000 - 1,255
Work from Home +1 508 £78,750 +11.70% 883
North of England -5 377 £75,000 +11.11% 288
North West -25 179 £80,000 +37.93% 167
South East -24 152 £66,250 +1.92% 214
Midlands -5 107 £75,000 +11.11% 121
North East +20 104 £66,805 +40.64% 41
Yorkshire -13 94 £75,000 +7.14% 81
South West -15 88 £62,500 +4.17% 102
West Midlands -6 73 £75,000 +25.00% 94
Scotland -2 34 £100,000 +37.93% 85
East Midlands -16 34 £75,000 +10.29% 27
East of England -27 30 £70,000 +40.00% 54
Wales -37 28 £63,500 +26.69% 17
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 53

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
1 163 (9.95%) Apache Spark
2 132 (8.05%) Apache Airflow
3 130 (7.93%) Apache
4 22 (1.34%) Jupyter
5 21 (1.28%) Palantir Foundry
6 13 (0.79%) Confluence
7 10 (0.61%) SAS
8 9 (0.55%) Oracle Workflow
8 9 (0.55%) SharePoint
9 4 (0.24%) Luigi
10 2 (0.12%) Adobe Experience Manager
10 2 (0.12%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.12%) Tornado
11 1 (0.061%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.061%) CMS
11 1 (0.061%) GeoServer
Applications
1 20 (1.22%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (0.55%) Spreadsheet
3 8 (0.49%) MS Visio
4 2 (0.12%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.061%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.061%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 1 (0.061%) Microsoft Project
5 1 (0.061%) Notion
Business Applications
1 5 (0.31%) Dynamics CRM
1 5 (0.31%) IBM Planning Analytics
2 2 (0.12%) SAP Business One
3 1 (0.061%) Academy Revenues and Benefits
3 1 (0.061%) FastStats
3 1 (0.061%) NetSuite
3 1 (0.061%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.061%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.061%) SAP SD
Cloud Services
1 664 (40.51%) Azure
2 472 (28.80%) AWS
3 275 (16.78%) Power Platform
4 267 (16.29%) GCP
5 185 (11.29%) Azure Data Factory
6 177 (10.80%) Snowflake
7 128 (7.81%) dbt
8 123 (7.50%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 103 (6.28%) Azure DevOps
10 102 (6.22%) Amazon S3
11 95 (5.80%) Serverless
12 68 (4.15%) AWS Lambda
13 66 (4.03%) GitHub
14 65 (3.97%) Azure Machine Learning
15 64 (3.90%) SaaS
16 52 (3.17%) Amazon EMR
17 50 (3.05%) Azure AI
17 50 (3.05%) Azure Databricks
18 47 (2.87%) Microsoft Purview
19 41 (2.50%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 17 (1.04%) 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
1 278 (16.96%) Data Warehouse
2 266 (16.23%) Power BI
3 195 (11.90%) Data Lake
4 112 (6.83%) SQL Server
5 108 (6.59%) Metadata
6 102 (6.22%) BigQuery
7 99 (6.04%) Amazon Redshift
8 92 (5.61%) Tableau
9 82 (5.00%) Big Data
10 69 (4.21%) Azure SQL Database
11 63 (3.84%) NoSQL
12 60 (3.66%) Semantic Layer
13 56 (3.42%) Relational Database
13 56 (3.42%) Star Schema
14 55 (3.36%) Delta Lake
15 51 (3.11%) Amazon Athena
15 51 (3.11%) PostgreSQL
16 45 (2.75%) Spark SQL
17 35 (2.14%) Data Vault
18 34 (2.07%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 130 (7.93%) Git
2 36 (2.20%) Jenkins
3 30 (1.83%) GitLab
4 25 (1.53%) JIRA
5 10 (0.61%) Claude Code
6 5 (0.31%) MLflow
6 5 (0.31%) Poetry
7 4 (0.24%) Octopus Deploy
7 4 (0.24%) Visual Studio Code
8 3 (0.18%) Bitbucket
8 3 (0.18%) Selenium
9 2 (0.12%) ERwin
9 2 (0.12%) VSS/SourceSafe
10 1 (0.061%) kappa
10 1 (0.061%) RStudio
10 1 (0.061%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 1 (0.061%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.061%) Yeoman
General
1 424 (25.87%) Finance
1 424 (25.87%) Social Skills
2 266 (16.23%) Analytical Skills
3 149 (9.09%) Public Sector
4 113 (6.89%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 72 (4.39%) Banking
6 58 (3.54%) Retail
7 55 (3.36%) Marketing
8 48 (2.93%) Legal
9 38 (2.32%) Law
10 36 (2.20%) Influencing Skills
11 33 (2.01%) Financial Institution
12 25 (1.53%) Manufacturing
13 22 (1.34%) Advertising
14 14 (0.85%) Games
14 14 (0.85%) Presentation Skills
15 12 (0.73%) Aerospace
15 12 (0.73%) Documentation Skills
15 12 (0.73%) Organisational Skills
16 10 (0.61%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 654 (39.90%) Data Engineer
2 361 (22.03%) Senior
3 296 (18.06%) Lead
4 192 (11.71%) Senior Data Engineer
5 141 (8.60%) Architect
6 105 (6.41%) Data Manager
7 99 (6.04%) Data Architect
8 95 (5.80%) Lead Data Engineer
9 79 (4.82%) Analyst
10 74 (4.51%) Principal Engineer
11 72 (4.39%) Developer
12 67 (4.09%) Software Engineer
13 65 (3.97%) Consultant
14 62 (3.78%) Engineering Manager
15 50 (3.05%) Databricks Engineer
16 46 (2.81%) Head of Engineering
16 46 (2.81%) Principal Data Engineer
17 44 (2.68%) Data Consultant
18 42 (2.56%) Data Scientist
19 41 (2.50%) Databricks Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 182 (11.10%) PySpark
2 134 (8.18%) Terraform
3 76 (4.64%) Kafka
4 41 (2.50%) .NET
5 36 (2.20%) REST
6 32 (1.95%) LangChain
7 31 (1.89%) Pandas
8 27 (1.65%) Node.js
9 24 (1.46%) LlamaIndex
9 24 (1.46%) SpaCy
10 22 (1.34%) JSON
10 22 (1.34%) scikit-learn
11 21 (1.28%) PyTorch
11 21 (1.28%) TensorFlow
12 15 (0.92%) Apache NiFi
13 14 (0.85%) RESTful
14 12 (0.73%) NumPy
14 12 (0.73%) React
14 12 (0.73%) YAML
15 11 (0.67%) FastAPI
Miscellaneous
1 173 (10.56%) Cloud Native
2 66 (4.03%) Data Structures
3 57 (3.48%) Product Ownership
4 55 (3.36%) Distributed Systems
5 49 (2.99%) Onboarding
6 37 (2.26%) AI Agents
7 24 (1.46%) e-Learning
8 21 (1.28%) Self-Motivation
9 18 (1.10%) Analytical Mindset
9 18 (1.10%) Legacy Systems
10 17 (1.04%) Distributed Computing
11 16 (0.98%) Hedge funds
11 16 (0.98%) Hybrid Cloud
12 15 (0.92%) Greenfield Project
12 15 (0.92%) Management Information System
13 14 (0.85%) Distributed Architecture
13 14 (0.85%) IoT
13 14 (0.85%) Low-Code
14 11 (0.67%) Blog
14 11 (0.67%) Sports Betting
Operating Systems
1 7 (0.43%) Windows
2 4 (0.24%) Linux
3 1 (0.061%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 770 (46.98%) Analytics
2 580 (35.39%) AI
3 578 (35.27%) Data Pipeline
4 505 (30.81%) Data Modelling
5 466 (28.43%) ETL
6 445 (27.15%) CI/CD
7 402 (24.53%) Business Intelligence
8 389 (23.73%) Agile
9 385 (23.49%) Decision-Making
10 380 (23.18%) Data Governance
11 358 (21.84%) Machine Learning
12 345 (21.05%) Data Architecture
13 314 (19.16%) DevOps
14 304 (18.55%) Mentoring
15 278 (16.96%) Problem-Solving
16 252 (15.38%) Data Science
17 220 (13.42%) Roadmaps
18 214 (13.06%) Technical Leadership
19 189 (11.53%) Continuous Improvement
20 188 (11.47%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 825 (50.34%) SQL
2 814 (49.66%) Python
3 122 (7.44%) Java
4 74 (4.51%) Scala
5 60 (3.66%) JavaScript
6 52 (3.17%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 35 (2.14%) C#
8 33 (2.01%) C++
8 33 (2.01%) TypeScript
9 26 (1.59%) R
10 19 (1.16%) Bash
11 15 (0.92%) T-SQL
12 14 (0.85%) PowerShell
13 10 (0.61%) Go
14 9 (0.55%) Bicep
15 6 (0.37%) Groovy
16 5 (0.31%) PL/SQL
16 5 (0.31%) VBA
17 4 (0.24%) Rust
18 2 (0.12%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 182 (11.10%) Security Cleared
2 160 (9.76%) Degree
3 125 (7.63%) SC Cleared
4 55 (3.36%) Master's Degree
5 47 (2.87%) Azure Certification
6 46 (2.81%) Computer Science Degree
7 41 (2.50%) DV Cleared
8 31 (1.89%) BPSS Clearance
9 30 (1.83%) AWS Certification
10 28 (1.71%) PhD
11 24 (1.46%) DBS Check
12 17 (1.04%) Microsoft Certification
13 15 (0.92%) ACCA
13 15 (0.92%) CIMA
14 6 (0.37%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 6 (0.37%) CBAP
14 6 (0.37%) Numerate Degree
15 4 (0.24%) CCA
16 3 (0.18%) CISSP
16 3 (0.18%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 473 (28.86%) Data Quality
2 59 (3.60%) Accessibility
3 57 (3.48%) GDPR
4 36 (2.20%) QA
5 10 (0.61%) Actionable Recommendations
6 9 (0.55%) GRC
6 9 (0.55%) NCSC
7 4 (0.24%) SLA
8 3 (0.18%) EU AI Act
8 3 (0.18%) PCI DSS
8 3 (0.18%) PERC
8 3 (0.18%) PMO
8 3 (0.18%) PSD2
9 2 (0.12%) ISO/IEC 42001
10 1 (0.061%) Cyber Essentials
10 1 (0.061%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
10 1 (0.061%) IASME
10 1 (0.061%) ISO 9001
10 1 (0.061%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 1 (0.061%) NIST
System Software
1 101 (6.16%) Docker
2 39 (2.38%) Virtual Machines
3 8 (0.49%) Active Directory
4 3 (0.18%) NDS
4 3 (0.18%) VMware Infrastructure
5 1 (0.061%) Embedded Firmware
5 1 (0.061%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 69 (4.21%) Kubernetes
2 13 (0.79%) Grafana
3 5 (0.31%) 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
1 380 (23.18%) Databricks
2 313 (19.10%) Microsoft
3 97 (5.92%) Google
4 37 (2.26%) Oracle
5 32 (1.95%) Palantir
5 32 (1.95%) Salesforce
6 29 (1.77%) Foundry
7 28 (1.71%) SAP
8 25 (1.53%) OpenAI
9 18 (1.10%) Informatica
10 11 (0.67%) Sage
11 9 (0.55%) Alteryx
12 7 (0.43%) YouTube
13 5 (0.31%) IBM
13 5 (0.31%) MicroStrategy
14 4 (0.24%) Cloudera
14 4 (0.24%) Cognos
14 4 (0.24%) Talend
15 3 (0.18%) LexisNexis
15 3 (0.18%) Okta