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

6 months to
1 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 129 144 146
Rank change year-on-year +15 +2 +53
Permanent jobs citing Data Engineering 1,613 1,069 1,427
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.47% 2.14% 1.75%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.01% 2.41% 2.17%
Number of salaries quoted 1,134 463 706
10th Percentile £46,217 £46,000 £42,750
25th Percentile £55,648 £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 £67,500 £62,500
% change year-on-year +3.70% +8.00% -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 80,269 44,315 65,850
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.06% 88.64% 80.88%
Number of salaries quoted 55,761 25,263 40,217
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 £56,000
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% -1.79% -6.67%
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% -6.87%

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 1 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 1 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 1,516 £80,000 +14.29% 1,549
UK excluding London -16 778 £70,000 +3.70% 770
London +38 736 £90,000 +3.45% 1,039
Work from Home +15 484 £82,250 +13.45% 693
North of England -2 348 £77,500 +14.81% 223
North West -32 166 £80,000 +33.33% 145
South East -53 156 £70,000 +7.69% 182
Midlands +2 104 £70,000 +3.70% 66
Yorkshire -7 98 £80,000 +15.94% 42
North East +10 84 £65,000 +36.84% 37
South West -30 78 £60,000 -4.00% 96
West Midlands +4 69 £72,500 +20.83% 55
East of England +9 56 £70,000 +40.00% 44
East Midlands -3 35 £52,500 -22.79% 11
Scotland -26 20 £82,500 +13.79% 95
Wales -51 18 £61,750 +3.67% 18
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 47

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
1 178 (11.04%) Apache Spark
2 156 (9.67%) Apache Airflow
3 127 (7.87%) Apache
4 27 (1.67%) Palantir Foundry
5 20 (1.24%) Jupyter
6 18 (1.12%) SAS
7 11 (0.68%) SharePoint
8 8 (0.50%) 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 10 (0.62%) 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
1 677 (41.97%) Azure
2 478 (29.63%) AWS
3 288 (17.85%) Power Platform
4 276 (17.11%) GCP
5 227 (14.07%) Snowflake
6 169 (10.48%) Azure Data Factory
7 157 (9.73%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 144 (8.93%) dbt
9 91 (5.64%) Serverless
10 87 (5.39%) Azure DevOps
11 86 (5.33%) Amazon S3
12 85 (5.27%) Azure Machine Learning
13 69 (4.28%) Azure AI
14 61 (3.78%) SaaS
15 60 (3.72%) GitHub
16 48 (2.98%) AWS Lambda
17 46 (2.85%) Azure Databricks
17 46 (2.85%) Microsoft Purview
18 42 (2.60%) Amazon EMR
19 30 (1.86%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 24 (1.49%) Broadband
2 7 (0.43%) Internet
3 4 (0.25%) 5G
4 2 (0.12%) DAB
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
Database & Business Intelligence
1 306 (18.97%) Data Warehouse
2 276 (17.11%) Power BI
3 232 (14.38%) Data Lake
4 136 (8.43%) SQL Server
5 125 (7.75%) BigQuery
6 113 (7.01%) Tableau
7 110 (6.82%) Amazon Redshift
8 96 (5.95%) Metadata
9 88 (5.46%) Big Data
10 63 (3.91%) Azure SQL Database
11 61 (3.78%) NoSQL
12 60 (3.72%) Semantic Layer
13 59 (3.66%) PostgreSQL
14 58 (3.60%) Relational Database
14 58 (3.60%) Star Schema
15 55 (3.41%) Delta Lake
16 54 (3.35%) Looker
17 49 (3.04%) Elasticsearch
18 45 (2.79%) Snowflake Schema
19 43 (2.67%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 99 (6.14%) Git
2 32 (1.98%) Jenkins
3 30 (1.86%) MLflow
4 21 (1.30%) 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
1 421 (26.10%) Finance
2 394 (24.43%) Social Skills
3 274 (16.99%) Analytical Skills
4 123 (7.63%) Public Sector
5 108 (6.70%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 70 (4.34%) Banking
7 56 (3.47%) Marketing
7 56 (3.47%) Retail
8 42 (2.60%) Legal
9 36 (2.23%) Law
10 35 (2.17%) Influencing Skills
11 29 (1.80%) Financial Institution
12 26 (1.61%) Manufacturing
13 25 (1.55%) Advertising
14 18 (1.12%) Games
15 12 (0.74%) Aerospace
16 11 (0.68%) Presentation Skills
17 10 (0.62%) Police
18 9 (0.56%) Front Office
18 9 (0.56%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 601 (37.26%) Data Engineer
2 353 (21.88%) Senior
3 295 (18.29%) Lead
4 164 (10.17%) Senior Data Engineer
5 142 (8.80%) Architect
6 112 (6.94%) Data Manager
7 98 (6.08%) Data Architect
8 96 (5.95%) Lead Data Engineer
9 72 (4.46%) Analyst
9 72 (4.46%) Principal Engineer
10 70 (4.34%) Engineering Manager
11 68 (4.22%) Consultant
12 66 (4.09%) Developer
13 59 (3.66%) Databricks Engineer
14 48 (2.98%) Head of Engineering
15 47 (2.91%) Data Consultant
15 47 (2.91%) Databricks Data Engineer
16 44 (2.73%) Principal Data Engineer
17 43 (2.67%) Data Scientist
18 42 (2.60%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 157 (9.73%) PySpark
2 122 (7.56%) Terraform
3 98 (6.08%) Kafka
4 47 (2.91%) LangChain
5 43 (2.67%) PyTorch
5 43 (2.67%) scikit-learn
5 43 (2.67%) TensorFlow
6 40 (2.48%) LlamaIndex
7 39 (2.42%) REST
8 29 (1.80%) .NET
8 29 (1.80%) pgvector
9 27 (1.67%) Node.js
10 24 (1.49%) Pandas
11 21 (1.30%) SpaCy
12 19 (1.18%) JSON
13 17 (1.05%) Apache NiFi
14 15 (0.93%) RESTful
15 11 (0.68%) ARM Templates
15 11 (0.68%) FastAPI
16 10 (0.62%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 187 (11.59%) Cloud Native
2 69 (4.28%) Data Structures
3 68 (4.22%) Product Ownership
4 55 (3.41%) Distributed Systems
5 41 (2.54%) Onboarding
6 30 (1.86%) AI Agents
7 27 (1.67%) e-Learning
8 26 (1.61%) Public Cloud
9 25 (1.55%) Clustering
10 21 (1.30%) Distributed Computing
10 21 (1.30%) Low-Code
11 20 (1.24%) Analytical Mindset
11 20 (1.24%) Management Information System
11 20 (1.24%) Self-Motivation
12 19 (1.18%) Legacy Systems
13 17 (1.05%) Greenfield Project
14 14 (0.87%) Distributed Architecture
14 14 (0.87%) Hedge funds
15 13 (0.81%) IoT
16 12 (0.74%) Algorithms
Operating Systems
1 7 (0.43%) Windows
2 5 (0.31%) Linux
3 1 (0.062%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 763 (47.30%) Analytics
2 623 (38.62%) AI
3 560 (34.72%) Data Pipeline
4 511 (31.68%) Data Modelling
5 445 (27.59%) ETL
6 424 (26.29%) Data Governance
7 414 (25.67%) Business Intelligence
8 405 (25.11%) Machine Learning
9 395 (24.49%) CI/CD
10 373 (23.12%) Agile
10 373 (23.12%) Decision-Making
11 355 (22.01%) Data Architecture
12 297 (18.41%) DevOps
13 296 (18.35%) Mentoring
14 283 (17.54%) Data Science
15 247 (15.31%) Problem-Solving
16 243 (15.07%) Roadmaps
17 221 (13.70%) Lakehouse
18 182 (11.28%) Continuous Improvement
19 180 (11.16%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 812 (50.34%) SQL
2 803 (49.78%) Python
3 116 (7.19%) Java
4 66 (4.09%) Scala
5 51 (3.16%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 47 (2.91%) JavaScript
7 27 (1.67%) R
8 24 (1.49%) C#
9 22 (1.36%) TypeScript
10 19 (1.18%) C++
11 18 (1.12%) Bash
12 17 (1.05%) Go
13 15 (0.93%) T-SQL
14 14 (0.87%) PowerShell
15 8 (0.50%) 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
1 181 (11.22%) Degree
2 149 (9.24%) Security Cleared
3 93 (5.77%) SC Cleared
4 59 (3.66%) Master's Degree
5 57 (3.53%) Computer Science Degree
6 42 (2.60%) DV Cleared
7 40 (2.48%) Azure Certification
8 37 (2.29%) DBS Check
9 28 (1.74%) BPSS Clearance
10 23 (1.43%) 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
1 439 (27.22%) Data Quality
2 86 (5.33%) GDPR
3 54 (3.35%) Accessibility
4 41 (2.54%) QA
5 24 (1.49%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 15 (0.93%) GRC
7 9 (0.56%) Actionable Recommendations
8 7 (0.43%) PERC
9 6 (0.37%) SLA
10 5 (0.31%) NCSC
11 4 (0.25%) PMO
11 4 (0.25%) Solvency II
12 3 (0.19%) EU AI Act
12 3 (0.19%) PCI DSS
12 3 (0.19%) PSD2
13 2 (0.12%) ISO/IEC 42001
14 1 (0.062%) HIPAA
14 1 (0.062%) ISO/IEC 27001
14 1 (0.062%) NIST
System Software
1 89 (5.52%) Docker
2 56 (3.47%) 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 58 (3.60%) 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
1 452 (28.02%) Databricks
2 300 (18.60%) Microsoft
3 90 (5.58%) Google
4 45 (2.79%) Dell
5 41 (2.54%) Informatica
6 40 (2.48%) Palantir
7 36 (2.23%) Foundry
8 33 (2.05%) Oracle
9 30 (1.86%) SAP
10 27 (1.67%) Cloudera
10 27 (1.67%) OpenAI
11 22 (1.36%) Salesforce
11 22 (1.36%) Teradata
12 20 (1.24%) 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