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

6 months to
23 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 134 151 156
Rank change year-on-year +17 +5 +48
Permanent jobs citing Data Engineering 1,644 1,056 1,296
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.41% 2.16% 1.72%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.93% 2.43% 2.11%
Number of salaries quoted 1,166 474 639
10th Percentile £46,217 £46,000 £42,500
25th Percentile £55,514 £55,000 £55,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £77,500 £70,000 £70,000
Median % change year-on-year +10.71% - -6.67%
75th Percentile £100,000 £95,000 £92,500
90th Percentile £112,500 £112,500 £105,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £70,000 £65,000 £61,875
% change year-on-year +7.69% +5.05% -4.81%

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 85,252 43,434 61,296
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.06% 88.68% 81.27%
Number of salaries quoted 58,899 24,470 34,327
10th Percentile £31,250 £28,500 £32,500
25th Percentile £42,000 £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 23 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 23 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 +20 1,518 £79,250 +13.21% 2,064
UK excluding London -16 827 £70,000 +7.69% 942
London +24 715 £87,500 +2.94% 1,294
Work from Home +2 512 £77,500 +9.93% 877
North of England -5 379 £75,000 +11.11% 284
North West -28 178 £80,000 +36.75% 175
South East -47 153 £65,000 - 222
Midlands -6 112 £75,000 +11.11% 124
North East +17 102 £66,805 +40.64% 42
Yorkshire -3 99 £75,000 +7.14% 68
South West -14 91 £62,500 +4.17% 104
West Midlands -2 78 £75,000 +25.00% 95
East Midlands -19 34 £75,000 +10.29% 29
East of England -33 34 £70,000 +40.00% 62
Scotland -2 33 £100,000 +37.93% 88
Wales -50 28 £63,500 +26.69% 15
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 44

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
1 162 (9.85%) Apache Spark
2 130 (7.91%) Apache Airflow
3 129 (7.85%) Apache
4 21 (1.28%) Jupyter
4 21 (1.28%) Palantir Foundry
5 12 (0.73%) SAS
6 11 (0.67%) Confluence
7 10 (0.61%) SharePoint
8 9 (0.55%) Oracle Workflow
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
11 1 (0.061%) Moodle
Applications
1 19 (1.16%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (0.55%) Spreadsheet
3 6 (0.36%) 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
Business Applications
1 5 (0.30%) Dynamics CRM
1 5 (0.30%) 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%) Infor M3
3 1 (0.061%) NetSuite
3 1 (0.061%) Oracle Assets
3 1 (0.061%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.061%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.061%) SAP SD
Cloud Services
1 673 (40.94%) Azure
2 467 (28.41%) AWS
3 277 (16.85%) Power Platform
4 262 (15.94%) GCP
5 189 (11.50%) Azure Data Factory
6 175 (10.64%) Snowflake
7 125 (7.60%) dbt
8 124 (7.54%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 105 (6.39%) Azure DevOps
10 100 (6.08%) Amazon S3
11 97 (5.90%) Serverless
12 68 (4.14%) Azure Machine Learning
13 66 (4.01%) AWS Lambda
13 66 (4.01%) GitHub
14 63 (3.83%) SaaS
15 52 (3.16%) Azure AI
16 51 (3.10%) Amazon EMR
17 49 (2.98%) Azure Databricks
18 47 (2.86%) Microsoft Purview
19 41 (2.49%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 17 (1.03%) 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
1 282 (17.15%) Data Warehouse
2 268 (16.30%) Power BI
3 199 (12.10%) Data Lake
4 117 (7.12%) SQL Server
5 107 (6.51%) Metadata
6 103 (6.27%) BigQuery
7 98 (5.96%) Amazon Redshift
8 93 (5.66%) Tableau
9 84 (5.11%) Big Data
10 71 (4.32%) Azure SQL Database
11 63 (3.83%) NoSQL
12 60 (3.65%) Semantic Layer
13 59 (3.59%) Relational Database
14 57 (3.47%) Delta Lake
15 56 (3.41%) Star Schema
16 50 (3.04%) Amazon Athena
16 50 (3.04%) PostgreSQL
17 47 (2.86%) Spark SQL
18 35 (2.13%) Data Vault
19 34 (2.07%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 127 (7.73%) Git
2 36 (2.19%) Jenkins
3 28 (1.70%) GitLab
4 23 (1.40%) JIRA
5 10 (0.61%) Claude Code
6 5 (0.30%) MLflow
6 5 (0.30%) 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
1 426 (25.91%) Finance
2 423 (25.73%) Social Skills
3 275 (16.73%) Analytical Skills
4 144 (8.76%) Public Sector
5 108 (6.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 74 (4.50%) Banking
7 58 (3.53%) Retail
8 53 (3.22%) Marketing
9 47 (2.86%) Legal
10 38 (2.31%) Law
11 37 (2.25%) Influencing Skills
12 33 (2.01%) Financial Institution
13 25 (1.52%) 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 11 (0.67%) Documentation Skills
18 10 (0.61%) Police
Job Titles
1 661 (40.21%) Data Engineer
2 359 (21.84%) Senior
3 297 (18.07%) Lead
4 192 (11.68%) Senior Data Engineer
5 139 (8.45%) Architect
6 106 (6.45%) Data Manager
7 98 (5.96%) Data Architect
8 97 (5.90%) Lead Data Engineer
9 76 (4.62%) Analyst
10 73 (4.44%) Principal Engineer
11 72 (4.38%) Developer
12 63 (3.83%) Software Engineer
13 62 (3.77%) Engineering Manager
14 61 (3.71%) Consultant
15 54 (3.28%) Databricks Engineer
16 46 (2.80%) Head of Engineering
17 45 (2.74%) Principal Data Engineer
18 44 (2.68%) Data Scientist
18 44 (2.68%) Databricks Data Engineer
19 42 (2.55%) Data Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 185 (11.25%) PySpark
2 132 (8.03%) Terraform
3 76 (4.62%) Kafka
4 41 (2.49%) .NET
5 36 (2.19%) REST
6 29 (1.76%) LangChain
7 28 (1.70%) Pandas
8 27 (1.64%) Node.js
9 24 (1.46%) SpaCy
10 22 (1.34%) JSON
10 22 (1.34%) LlamaIndex
11 21 (1.28%) PyTorch
11 21 (1.28%) scikit-learn
11 21 (1.28%) TensorFlow
12 16 (0.97%) Apache NiFi
13 14 (0.85%) RESTful
14 12 (0.73%) React
14 12 (0.73%) YAML
15 11 (0.67%) FastAPI
16 10 (0.61%) ARM Templates
Miscellaneous
1 175 (10.64%) Cloud Native
2 66 (4.01%) Data Structures
3 60 (3.65%) Product Ownership
4 55 (3.35%) Distributed Systems
5 48 (2.92%) Onboarding
6 36 (2.19%) AI Agents
7 26 (1.58%) e-Learning
8 21 (1.28%) Self-Motivation
9 20 (1.22%) Analytical Mindset
10 18 (1.09%) Distributed Computing
10 18 (1.09%) Legacy Systems
11 17 (1.03%) Hedge funds
12 16 (0.97%) Greenfield Project
12 16 (0.97%) Hybrid Cloud
12 16 (0.97%) Management Information System
13 15 (0.91%) Low-Code
14 14 (0.85%) Distributed Architecture
14 14 (0.85%) IoT
15 11 (0.67%) Sports Betting
16 10 (0.61%) Cyberattack
Operating Systems
1 7 (0.43%) Windows
2 4 (0.24%) Linux
3 1 (0.061%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 776 (47.20%) Analytics
2 586 (35.64%) Data Pipeline
3 581 (35.34%) AI
4 509 (30.96%) Data Modelling
5 475 (28.89%) ETL
6 444 (27.01%) CI/CD
7 405 (24.64%) Business Intelligence
8 393 (23.91%) Agile
9 390 (23.72%) Decision-Making
10 387 (23.54%) Data Governance
11 364 (22.14%) Machine Learning
12 349 (21.23%) Data Architecture
13 318 (19.34%) DevOps
14 309 (18.80%) Mentoring
15 275 (16.73%) Problem-Solving
16 255 (15.51%) Data Science
17 226 (13.75%) Roadmaps
18 212 (12.90%) Technical Leadership
19 190 (11.56%) Continuous Improvement
20 184 (11.19%) Lakehouse
Programming Languages
1 833 (50.67%) SQL
2 814 (49.51%) Python
3 123 (7.48%) Java
4 74 (4.50%) Scala
5 60 (3.65%) JavaScript
6 51 (3.10%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 35 (2.13%) C#
8 33 (2.01%) C++
9 32 (1.95%) TypeScript
10 28 (1.70%) R
11 20 (1.22%) Bash
12 16 (0.97%) T-SQL
13 14 (0.85%) PowerShell
14 10 (0.61%) Go
15 9 (0.55%) Bicep
16 7 (0.43%) Groovy
17 5 (0.30%) PL/SQL
17 5 (0.30%) VBA
18 4 (0.24%) Rust
19 2 (0.12%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 179 (10.89%) Security Cleared
2 160 (9.73%) Degree
3 121 (7.36%) SC Cleared
4 56 (3.41%) Master's Degree
5 49 (2.98%) Computer Science Degree
6 47 (2.86%) Azure Certification
7 40 (2.43%) DV Cleared
8 30 (1.82%) BPSS Clearance
9 27 (1.64%) AWS Certification
9 27 (1.64%) DBS Check
10 26 (1.58%) PhD
11 15 (0.91%) ACCA
11 15 (0.91%) CIMA
11 15 (0.91%) Microsoft Certification
12 6 (0.36%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 6 (0.36%) Numerate Degree
13 5 (0.30%) CBAP
14 4 (0.24%) CCA
15 3 (0.18%) CISSP
15 3 (0.18%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 477 (29.01%) Data Quality
2 59 (3.59%) GDPR
3 58 (3.53%) Accessibility
4 36 (2.19%) QA
5 9 (0.55%) Actionable Recommendations
5 9 (0.55%) GRC
6 8 (0.49%) NCSC
7 4 (0.24%) PERC
7 4 (0.24%) PMO
7 4 (0.24%) SLA
8 3 (0.18%) EU AI Act
8 3 (0.18%) PCI DSS
8 3 (0.18%) PSD2
9 2 (0.12%) ISO/IEC 42001
10 1 (0.061%) NIST
10 1 (0.061%) Solvency II
System Software
1 97 (5.90%) Docker
2 41 (2.49%) Virtual Machines
3 7 (0.43%) 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 67 (4.08%) 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
1 391 (23.78%) Databricks
2 315 (19.16%) Microsoft
3 93 (5.66%) Google
4 40 (2.43%) Oracle
5 32 (1.95%) Palantir
6 29 (1.76%) Foundry
6 29 (1.76%) Salesforce
6 29 (1.76%) SAP
7 25 (1.52%) OpenAI
8 19 (1.16%) Informatica
9 11 (0.67%) Sage
10 9 (0.55%) Alteryx
11 5 (0.30%) Cloudera
11 5 (0.30%) IBM
11 5 (0.30%) MicroStrategy
11 5 (0.30%) Talend
11 5 (0.30%) YouTube
12 4 (0.24%) Cognos
13 3 (0.18%) Adobe
13 3 (0.18%) PeopleSoft