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 4 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 131 154 151
Rank change year-on-year +23 -3 +60
Permanent jobs citing Data Engineering 1,610 1,032 1,303
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.36% 2.07% 1.76%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.86% 2.33% 2.14%
Number of salaries quoted 1,108 473 637
10th Percentile £46,077 £46,000 £42,500
25th Percentile £55,350 £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 £97,500 £93,750 £92,500
90th Percentile £110,000 £112,500 £110,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £70,000 £65,000 £60,000
% change year-on-year +7.69% +8.33% -7.69%

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 86,432 44,324 60,758
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.12% 89.10% 81.90%
Number of salaries quoted 59,358 24,582 33,017
10th Percentile £31,250 £28,250 £32,500
25th Percentile £41,250 £36,250 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,000 £59,000
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% -6.78% -1.67%
75th Percentile £78,750 £75,000 £77,500
90th Percentile £100,000 £95,000 £96,250
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 4 October 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 4 October 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 +14 1,475 £75,000 +7.14% 2,343
UK excluding London -16 792 £70,000 +7.69% 1,418
London +20 714 £85,000 - 1,281
Work from Home -10 485 £75,000 +6.38% 1,407
North of England -8 366 £75,000 +11.11% 383
North West -30 170 £75,000 +30.43% 193
South East -42 143 £64,500 -0.77% 303
North East +23 105 £65,000 +36.84% 79
Midlands +1 104 £75,000 +11.11% 179
Yorkshire -14 91 £75,000 +7.14% 114
South West -12 86 £62,500 +4.17% 133
West Midlands -7 72 £75,000 +25.00% 113
Scotland -3 39 £95,000 +11.76% 185
East Midlands -32 32 £80,000 +17.65% 66
East of England -31 29 £70,000 +36.59% 97
Wales -45 28 £63,500 +26.69% 80
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 63

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
1 169 (10.50%) Apache Spark
2 134 (8.32%) Apache
3 131 (8.14%) Apache Airflow
4 23 (1.43%) Jupyter
5 20 (1.24%) Palantir Foundry
6 14 (0.87%) Confluence
7 10 (0.62%) SAS
8 9 (0.56%) Oracle Workflow
8 9 (0.56%) SharePoint
9 4 (0.25%) Luigi
10 2 (0.12%) Adobe Experience Manager
10 2 (0.12%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.12%) Tornado
11 1 (0.062%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.062%) CMS
Applications
1 21 (1.30%) Microsoft Excel
2 10 (0.62%) Spreadsheet
3 8 (0.50%) MS Visio
4 3 (0.19%) Notion
5 2 (0.12%) Microsoft Office
6 1 (0.062%) Chatbot
6 1 (0.062%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 1 (0.062%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 5 (0.31%) Dynamics CRM
1 5 (0.31%) IBM Planning Analytics
2 2 (0.12%) SAP Business One
3 1 (0.062%) Academy Revenues and Benefits
3 1 (0.062%) Actimize
3 1 (0.062%) FastStats
3 1 (0.062%) NetSuite
3 1 (0.062%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.062%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 634 (39.38%) Azure
2 466 (28.94%) AWS
3 279 (17.33%) Power Platform
4 271 (16.83%) GCP
5 178 (11.06%) Azure Data Factory
6 155 (9.63%) Snowflake
7 130 (8.07%) dbt
8 103 (6.40%) Azure DevOps
9 102 (6.34%) Amazon S3
10 101 (6.27%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 95 (5.90%) Serverless
12 68 (4.22%) GitHub
13 67 (4.16%) AWS Lambda
14 65 (4.04%) SaaS
15 54 (3.35%) Amazon EMR
16 49 (3.04%) Azure Databricks
17 47 (2.92%) Azure Machine Learning
17 47 (2.92%) Microsoft Purview
18 40 (2.48%) Amazon EC2
19 31 (1.93%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 17 (1.06%) Broadband
2 7 (0.43%) Internet
3 4 (0.25%) 5G
4 3 (0.19%) HTTP
5 2 (0.12%) Firewall
6 1 (0.062%) 4G
6 1 (0.062%) ATM
6 1 (0.062%) DAB
6 1 (0.062%) DNS
6 1 (0.062%) HTTPS
6 1 (0.062%) MQTT
6 1 (0.062%) SMS
6 1 (0.062%) TCP/IP
6 1 (0.062%) tcpdump
6 1 (0.062%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 275 (17.08%) Data Warehouse
2 270 (16.77%) Power BI
3 193 (11.99%) Data Lake
4 113 (7.02%) Metadata
5 102 (6.34%) BigQuery
6 97 (6.02%) Amazon Redshift
7 90 (5.59%) SQL Server
8 87 (5.40%) Tableau
9 80 (4.97%) Big Data
10 64 (3.98%) Azure SQL Database
10 64 (3.98%) NoSQL
11 62 (3.85%) Semantic Layer
12 56 (3.48%) Relational Database
13 55 (3.42%) Delta Lake
14 54 (3.35%) PostgreSQL
15 53 (3.29%) Star Schema
16 52 (3.23%) Amazon Athena
17 44 (2.73%) Spark SQL
18 35 (2.17%) Data Vault
19 33 (2.05%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 135 (8.39%) Git
2 35 (2.17%) Jenkins
3 34 (2.11%) GitLab
4 24 (1.49%) JIRA
5 10 (0.62%) Claude Code
6 6 (0.37%) MLflow
7 5 (0.31%) Poetry
8 4 (0.25%) Octopus Deploy
8 4 (0.25%) Visual Studio Code
9 3 (0.19%) Bitbucket
10 2 (0.12%) ERwin
10 2 (0.12%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 2 (0.12%) VSS/SourceSafe
11 1 (0.062%) Cypress.io
11 1 (0.062%) kappa
11 1 (0.062%) RStudio
11 1 (0.062%) Selenium
11 1 (0.062%) Visual Studio
11 1 (0.062%) Yeoman
General
1 426 (26.46%) Social Skills
2 406 (25.22%) Finance
3 258 (16.02%) Analytical Skills
4 154 (9.57%) Public Sector
5 111 (6.89%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 69 (4.29%) Banking
7 53 (3.29%) Retail
8 51 (3.17%) Marketing
9 48 (2.98%) Legal
10 36 (2.24%) Influencing Skills
11 35 (2.17%) Financial Institution
11 35 (2.17%) Law
12 26 (1.61%) Manufacturing
13 21 (1.30%) Advertising
14 16 (0.99%) Games
15 15 (0.93%) Presentation Skills
16 12 (0.75%) Documentation Skills
17 11 (0.68%) Aerospace
17 11 (0.68%) Organisational Skills
17 11 (0.68%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 644 (40.00%) Data Engineer
2 364 (22.61%) Senior
3 291 (18.07%) Lead
4 188 (11.68%) Senior Data Engineer
5 140 (8.70%) Architect
6 97 (6.02%) Data Architect
7 94 (5.84%) Data Manager
8 93 (5.78%) Lead Data Engineer
9 80 (4.97%) Analyst
10 76 (4.72%) Software Engineer
11 75 (4.66%) Principal Engineer
12 73 (4.53%) Developer
13 64 (3.98%) Consultant
14 48 (2.98%) Databricks Engineer
14 48 (2.98%) Engineering Manager
15 47 (2.92%) Principal Data Engineer
16 44 (2.73%) Python Engineer
17 43 (2.67%) Head of Engineering
18 42 (2.61%) Data Consultant
18 42 (2.61%) Data Scientist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 178 (11.06%) PySpark
2 134 (8.32%) Terraform
3 77 (4.78%) Kafka
4 44 (2.73%) .NET
5 38 (2.36%) REST
6 33 (2.05%) Pandas
7 32 (1.99%) LangChain
8 27 (1.68%) Node.js
9 25 (1.55%) SpaCy
10 23 (1.43%) JSON
10 23 (1.43%) LlamaIndex
11 22 (1.37%) scikit-learn
12 21 (1.30%) PyTorch
12 21 (1.30%) TensorFlow
13 17 (1.06%) RESTful
14 16 (0.99%) React
15 15 (0.93%) Apache NiFi
16 13 (0.81%) FastAPI
17 12 (0.75%) NumPy
17 12 (0.75%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 174 (10.81%) Cloud Native
2 66 (4.10%) Data Structures
3 55 (3.42%) Product Ownership
4 54 (3.35%) Distributed Systems
5 49 (3.04%) Onboarding
6 41 (2.55%) AI Agents
7 25 (1.55%) e-Learning
8 21 (1.30%) Self-Motivation
9 17 (1.06%) Distributed Computing
9 17 (1.06%) Hedge funds
9 17 (1.06%) Legacy Systems
10 16 (0.99%) Analytical Mindset
10 16 (0.99%) Hybrid Cloud
11 14 (0.87%) Distributed Architecture
12 13 (0.81%) Greenfield Project
12 13 (0.81%) Low-Code
13 12 (0.75%) Blog
13 12 (0.75%) IoT
13 12 (0.75%) Management Information System
14 11 (0.68%) Reference Data
Operating Systems
1 7 (0.43%) Windows
2 4 (0.25%) Linux
3 1 (0.062%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 757 (47.02%) Analytics
2 572 (35.53%) Data Pipeline
3 558 (34.66%) AI
4 510 (31.68%) Data Modelling
5 455 (28.26%) ETL
6 454 (28.20%) CI/CD
7 399 (24.78%) Business Intelligence
8 376 (23.35%) Decision-Making
9 374 (23.23%) Agile
10 361 (22.42%) Data Governance
11 337 (20.93%) Machine Learning
12 312 (19.38%) DevOps
13 308 (19.13%) Data Architecture
14 301 (18.70%) Mentoring
15 274 (17.02%) Problem-Solving
16 248 (15.40%) Data Science
17 225 (13.98%) Technical Leadership
18 202 (12.55%) Software Engineering
19 195 (12.11%) Roadmaps
20 190 (11.80%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 812 (50.43%) Python
2 805 (50.00%) SQL
3 117 (7.27%) Java
4 72 (4.47%) Scala
5 57 (3.54%) JavaScript
6 51 (3.17%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 37 (2.30%) C#
7 37 (2.30%) TypeScript
8 34 (2.11%) C++
9 26 (1.61%) R
10 20 (1.24%) Bash
11 15 (0.93%) PowerShell
12 13 (0.81%) T-SQL
13 10 (0.62%) Go
14 9 (0.56%) Bicep
15 6 (0.37%) Groovy
16 5 (0.31%) PL/SQL
17 4 (0.25%) Rust
17 4 (0.25%) VBA
18 2 (0.12%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 190 (11.80%) Security Cleared
2 155 (9.63%) Degree
3 132 (8.20%) SC Cleared
4 56 (3.48%) Master's Degree
5 47 (2.92%) Azure Certification
6 43 (2.67%) Computer Science Degree
6 43 (2.67%) DV Cleared
7 33 (2.05%) AWS Certification
8 32 (1.99%) BPSS Clearance
9 30 (1.86%) PhD
10 26 (1.61%) DBS Check
11 16 (0.99%) Microsoft Certification
12 15 (0.93%) ACCA
12 15 (0.93%) CIMA
13 6 (0.37%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 6 (0.37%) Numerate Degree
14 5 (0.31%) CBAP
15 4 (0.25%) CCA
16 3 (0.19%) CISSP
16 3 (0.19%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 473 (29.38%) Data Quality
2 62 (3.85%) Accessibility
3 54 (3.35%) GDPR
4 41 (2.55%) QA
5 11 (0.68%) Actionable Recommendations
6 9 (0.56%) NCSC
7 7 (0.43%) GRC
8 3 (0.19%) EU AI Act
8 3 (0.19%) PCI DSS
8 3 (0.19%) PMO
8 3 (0.19%) PSD2
8 3 (0.19%) SLA
9 2 (0.12%) ISO/IEC 42001
10 1 (0.062%) Cyber Essentials
10 1 (0.062%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
10 1 (0.062%) IASME
10 1 (0.062%) ISO 9001
10 1 (0.062%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 1 (0.062%) NIST
System Software
1 108 (6.71%) Docker
2 20 (1.24%) Virtual Machines
3 10 (0.62%) Active Directory
4 3 (0.19%) NDS
4 3 (0.19%) VMware Infrastructure
5 1 (0.062%) Embedded Firmware
5 1 (0.062%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 74 (4.60%) Kubernetes
2 13 (0.81%) Grafana
3 5 (0.31%) Prometheus
4 4 (0.25%) Kibana
5 3 (0.19%) Ansible
5 3 (0.19%) Argo
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
1 351 (21.80%) Databricks
2 296 (18.39%) Microsoft
3 99 (6.15%) Google
4 37 (2.30%) Oracle
5 35 (2.17%) Salesforce
6 31 (1.93%) Palantir
7 28 (1.74%) Foundry
8 27 (1.68%) SAP
9 25 (1.55%) OpenAI
10 18 (1.12%) Informatica
11 11 (0.68%) Sage
12 9 (0.56%) Alteryx
13 8 (0.50%) YouTube
14 5 (0.31%) IBM
14 5 (0.31%) MicroStrategy
14 5 (0.31%) Talend
15 4 (0.25%) Cloudera
15 4 (0.25%) Cognos
16 3 (0.19%) CyberArk
16 3 (0.19%) ForgeRock