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

6 months to
2 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 125 147 143
Rank change year-on-year +22 -4 +57
Permanent jobs citing Data Engineering 1,617 1,068 1,426
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.47% 2.14% 1.75%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.01% 2.42% 2.17%
Number of salaries quoted 1,146 459 706
10th Percentile £46,217 £45,950 £42,750
25th Percentile £55,175 £55,000 £55,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £80,000 £70,000 £70,000
Median % change year-on-year +14.29% - -6.67%
75th Percentile £100,000 £95,000 £90,822
90th Percentile £115,000 £112,500 £105,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £70,000 £66,250 £62,500
% change year-on-year +5.66% +6.00% -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 80,408 44,155 65,787
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.09% 88.60% 80.85%
Number of salaries quoted 55,868 25,145 40,215
10th Percentile £31,250 £28,500 £31,250
25th Percentile £41,250 £36,250 £41,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,000 £56,075
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% -1.92% -6.54%
75th Percentile £78,750 £75,000 £75,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £96,250 £95,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £47,500 £51,000
% change year-on-year +15.79% -6.86% -6.58%

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 2 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 2 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 +22 1,518 £80,000 +14.29% 1,619
UK excluding London -7 785 £70,000 +5.66% 783
London +36 731 £87,500 +2.94% 1,094
Work from Home +11 493 £80,000 +12.37% 712
North of England +2 357 £77,500 +14.81% 222
North West -25 170 £80,000 +35.02% 149
South East -48 155 £70,000 +7.69% 193
Midlands +4 104 £70,000 +3.70% 67
Yorkshire -9 100 £77,500 +10.71% 41
North East +13 87 £65,000 +36.84% 33
South West -26 78 £60,000 -2.04% 99
West Midlands +2 70 £70,000 +16.67% 54
East of England +6 54 £70,000 +40.00% 49
East Midlands -12 34 £63,750 -6.25% 13
Wales -51 20 £63,500 +6.61% 17
Scotland -23 19 £82,500 +13.79% 98
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 39

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
1 174 (10.76%) Apache Spark
2 150 (9.28%) Apache Airflow
3 128 (7.92%) Apache
4 28 (1.73%) Palantir Foundry
5 20 (1.24%) Jupyter
6 18 (1.11%) SAS
7 11 (0.68%) SharePoint
8 8 (0.49%) Confluence
9 4 (0.25%) Luigi
10 3 (0.19%) Moodle
11 2 (0.12%) Apache Superset
11 2 (0.12%) Tornado
12 1 (0.062%) Adobe Experience Manager
12 1 (0.062%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.062%) CMS
12 1 (0.062%) GeoServer
Applications
1 19 (1.18%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (0.56%) Spreadsheet
3 2 (0.12%) MS Visio
4 1 (0.062%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.062%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 4 (0.25%) IBM Planning Analytics
2 2 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
2 2 (0.12%) SAP Business One
2 2 (0.12%) SAP SD
3 1 (0.062%) FastStats
3 1 (0.062%) Infor M3
3 1 (0.062%) NetSuite
3 1 (0.062%) Oracle Assets
3 1 (0.062%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.062%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 675 (41.74%) Azure
2 481 (29.75%) AWS
3 285 (17.63%) Power Platform
4 274 (16.94%) GCP
5 219 (13.54%) Snowflake
6 170 (10.51%) Azure Data Factory
7 152 (9.40%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 138 (8.53%) dbt
9 99 (6.12%) Serverless
10 87 (5.38%) Amazon S3
10 87 (5.38%) Azure DevOps
11 84 (5.19%) Azure Machine Learning
12 69 (4.27%) Azure AI
13 60 (3.71%) GitHub
14 59 (3.65%) SaaS
15 56 (3.46%) AWS Lambda
16 48 (2.97%) Amazon EMR
17 46 (2.84%) Azure Databricks
17 46 (2.84%) Microsoft Purview
18 38 (2.35%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 24 (1.48%) Broadband
2 7 (0.43%) Internet
3 4 (0.25%) 5G
4 2 (0.12%) Firewall
4 2 (0.12%) HTTP
4 2 (0.12%) MQTT
5 1 (0.062%) 4G
5 1 (0.062%) ATM
5 1 (0.062%) DAB
Database & Business Intelligence
1 298 (18.43%) Data Warehouse
2 273 (16.88%) Power BI
3 227 (14.04%) Data Lake
4 136 (8.41%) SQL Server
5 121 (7.48%) BigQuery
6 109 (6.74%) Tableau
7 105 (6.49%) Amazon Redshift
8 96 (5.94%) Metadata
9 88 (5.44%) Big Data
10 63 (3.90%) Azure SQL Database
11 61 (3.77%) NoSQL
12 60 (3.71%) Semantic Layer
13 59 (3.65%) PostgreSQL
13 59 (3.65%) Relational Database
14 58 (3.59%) Star Schema
15 55 (3.40%) Delta Lake
16 51 (3.15%) Spark SQL
17 50 (3.09%) Looker
18 45 (2.78%) Elasticsearch
19 41 (2.54%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 102 (6.31%) Git
2 32 (1.98%) Jenkins
3 26 (1.61%) MLflow
4 22 (1.36%) GitLab
5 19 (1.18%) JIRA
6 9 (0.56%) Claude Code
7 4 (0.25%) Bitbucket
7 4 (0.25%) Selenium
8 3 (0.19%) Poetry
8 3 (0.19%) Visual Studio Code
9 2 (0.12%) ERwin
9 2 (0.12%) VSS/SourceSafe
10 1 (0.062%) IBM UrbanCode
10 1 (0.062%) kappa
10 1 (0.062%) Octopus Deploy
10 1 (0.062%) RStudio
10 1 (0.062%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 1 (0.062%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.062%) Yeoman
General
1 425 (26.28%) Finance
2 395 (24.43%) Social Skills
3 280 (17.32%) Analytical Skills
4 134 (8.29%) Public Sector
5 110 (6.80%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 70 (4.33%) Banking
7 56 (3.46%) Retail
8 55 (3.40%) Marketing
9 44 (2.72%) Legal
10 38 (2.35%) Law
11 35 (2.16%) Influencing Skills
12 29 (1.79%) Financial Institution
13 26 (1.61%) Manufacturing
14 25 (1.55%) Advertising
15 18 (1.11%) Games
16 12 (0.74%) Aerospace
17 11 (0.68%) Presentation Skills
18 10 (0.62%) Organisational Skills
18 10 (0.62%) Police
19 9 (0.56%) Documentation Skills
Job Titles
1 608 (37.60%) Data Engineer
2 352 (21.77%) Senior
3 298 (18.43%) Lead
4 166 (10.27%) Senior Data Engineer
5 142 (8.78%) Architect
6 112 (6.93%) Data Manager
7 98 (6.06%) Data Architect
8 97 (6.00%) Lead Data Engineer
9 72 (4.45%) Analyst
9 72 (4.45%) Principal Engineer
10 71 (4.39%) Engineering Manager
11 68 (4.21%) Consultant
11 68 (4.21%) Developer
12 59 (3.65%) Databricks Engineer
13 48 (2.97%) Head of Engineering
14 47 (2.91%) Data Consultant
14 47 (2.91%) Databricks Data Engineer
15 44 (2.72%) Principal Data Engineer
16 43 (2.66%) Data Scientist
16 43 (2.66%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 166 (10.27%) PySpark
2 122 (7.54%) Terraform
3 93 (5.75%) Kafka
4 45 (2.78%) LangChain
5 41 (2.54%) REST
6 39 (2.41%) PyTorch
6 39 (2.41%) scikit-learn
6 39 (2.41%) TensorFlow
7 38 (2.35%) LlamaIndex
8 37 (2.29%) .NET
9 27 (1.67%) Node.js
10 25 (1.55%) pgvector
11 24 (1.48%) Pandas
12 21 (1.30%) SpaCy
13 20 (1.24%) JSON
14 17 (1.05%) Apache NiFi
15 14 (0.87%) RESTful
16 11 (0.68%) ARM Templates
16 11 (0.68%) FastAPI
17 10 (0.62%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 183 (11.32%) Cloud Native
2 69 (4.27%) Data Structures
3 67 (4.14%) Product Ownership
4 54 (3.34%) Distributed Systems
5 42 (2.60%) Onboarding
6 30 (1.86%) AI Agents
7 27 (1.67%) e-Learning
8 22 (1.36%) Public Cloud
9 21 (1.30%) Clustering
9 21 (1.30%) Distributed Computing
9 21 (1.30%) Low-Code
10 20 (1.24%) Analytical Mindset
10 20 (1.24%) Management Information System
11 19 (1.18%) Legacy Systems
11 19 (1.18%) Self-Motivation
12 17 (1.05%) Greenfield Project
13 14 (0.87%) Distributed Architecture
13 14 (0.87%) Hedge funds
13 14 (0.87%) Hybrid Cloud
14 13 (0.80%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 7 (0.43%) Windows
2 5 (0.31%) Linux
3 1 (0.062%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 765 (47.31%) Analytics
2 620 (38.34%) AI
3 557 (34.45%) Data Pipeline
4 507 (31.35%) Data Modelling
5 454 (28.08%) ETL
6 419 (25.91%) Data Governance
7 415 (25.66%) Business Intelligence
8 408 (25.23%) CI/CD
9 401 (24.80%) Machine Learning
10 382 (23.62%) Agile
11 379 (23.44%) Decision-Making
12 356 (22.02%) Data Architecture
13 306 (18.92%) Mentoring
14 299 (18.49%) DevOps
15 281 (17.38%) Data Science
16 251 (15.52%) Problem-Solving
17 242 (14.97%) Roadmaps
18 214 (13.23%) Lakehouse
19 185 (11.44%) Continuous Improvement
20 183 (11.32%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 816 (50.46%) SQL
2 799 (49.41%) Python
3 124 (7.67%) Java
4 67 (4.14%) Scala
5 55 (3.40%) JavaScript
6 52 (3.22%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 32 (1.98%) C#
8 27 (1.67%) C++
9 26 (1.61%) R
10 23 (1.42%) TypeScript
11 18 (1.11%) Bash
12 17 (1.05%) Go
13 15 (0.93%) T-SQL
14 14 (0.87%) PowerShell
15 8 (0.49%) Groovy
16 7 (0.43%) Bicep
17 6 (0.37%) Julia
17 6 (0.37%) VBA
18 5 (0.31%) PL/SQL
19 4 (0.25%) Rust
Qualifications
1 177 (10.95%) Degree
2 150 (9.28%) Security Cleared
3 93 (5.75%) SC Cleared
4 59 (3.65%) Master's Degree
5 57 (3.53%) Computer Science Degree
6 43 (2.66%) DV Cleared
7 42 (2.60%) Azure Certification
8 37 (2.29%) DBS Check
9 29 (1.79%) BPSS Clearance
10 25 (1.55%) AWS Certification
11 22 (1.36%) PhD
12 14 (0.87%) ACCA
12 14 (0.87%) CIMA
12 14 (0.87%) Microsoft Certification
13 7 (0.43%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 6 (0.37%) Numerate Degree
15 4 (0.25%) CCA
16 3 (0.19%) CBAP
16 3 (0.19%) CISSP
16 3 (0.19%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 449 (27.77%) Data Quality
2 82 (5.07%) GDPR
3 54 (3.34%) Accessibility
4 41 (2.54%) QA
5 20 (1.24%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 15 (0.93%) GRC
7 9 (0.56%) Actionable Recommendations
8 7 (0.43%) PERC
9 6 (0.37%) NCSC
9 6 (0.37%) SLA
10 4 (0.25%) PMO
10 4 (0.25%) Solvency II
11 3 (0.19%) EU AI Act
11 3 (0.19%) PCI DSS
11 3 (0.19%) PSD2
12 2 (0.12%) ISO/IEC 42001
13 1 (0.062%) HIPAA
13 1 (0.062%) ISO/IEC 27001
13 1 (0.062%) NIST
System Software
1 90 (5.57%) Docker
2 56 (3.46%) Virtual Machines
3 6 (0.37%) Active Directory
4 3 (0.19%) VMware Infrastructure
5 2 (0.12%) NDS
6 1 (0.062%) Apache Flume
6 1 (0.062%) Embedded Firmware
6 1 (0.062%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 59 (3.65%) Kubernetes
2 14 (0.87%) Grafana
3 5 (0.31%) Ansible
3 5 (0.31%) Prometheus
4 4 (0.25%) Argo
5 3 (0.19%) Kibana
5 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Intune
5 3 (0.19%) SCCM
6 2 (0.12%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
6 2 (0.12%) Computer Incident Response Team
7 1 (0.062%) CASB
Vendors
1 443 (27.40%) Databricks
2 300 (18.55%) Microsoft
3 90 (5.57%) Google
4 41 (2.54%) Palantir
5 37 (2.29%) Dell
5 37 (2.29%) Foundry
5 37 (2.29%) Informatica
6 33 (2.04%) Oracle
7 30 (1.86%) SAP
8 27 (1.67%) OpenAI
9 23 (1.42%) Cloudera
10 22 (1.36%) Salesforce
11 18 (1.11%) Teradata
12 16 (0.99%) Denodo
13 11 (0.68%) Sage
14 9 (0.56%) Alteryx
15 5 (0.31%) MicroStrategy
15 5 (0.31%) Talend
16 4 (0.25%) Cognos
16 4 (0.25%) IBM