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 20 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 159 169 180
Rank change year-on-year +10 +11 -44
Permanent jobs citing Data Engineering 910 910 1,052
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.49% 1.72% 1.74%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.85% 1.89% 1.94%
Number of salaries quoted 578 575 698
10th Percentile £46,175 £42,500 £42,482
25th Percentile £57,500 £53,000 £55,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £71,000 £75,000 £70,000
Median % change year-on-year -5.33% +7.14% -6.67%
75th Percentile £87,586 £97,500 £92,500
90th Percentile £109,125 £115,000 £108,250
UK excluding London median annual salary £65,000 £62,500 £65,066
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.94% -3.61%

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 49,307 48,088 54,172
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 80.63% 90.91% 89.35%
Number of salaries quoted 29,027 23,255 41,501
10th Percentile £28,500 £35,000 £31,000
25th Percentile £37,500 £45,000 £41,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £60,000 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +4.35% -8.00%
75th Percentile £75,000 £80,000 £77,500
90th Percentile £95,000 £100,000 £96,539
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £55,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year -9.09% +10.00% -9.09%

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 20 January 2026.

Salary histogram for Data Engineering in the UK

Data Engineering
Top 16 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 20 January 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 +15 814 £70,000 -6.67% 640
London +52 453 £75,000 -18.92% 216
UK excluding London -7 382 £65,000 +4.00% 542
Work from Home +12 354 £75,000 -1.03% 286
North of England -34 110 £67,500 +28.57% 108
South East +2 92 £75,000 +7.14% 206
Midlands +49 84 £65,000 +16.07% 68
West Midlands +51 64 £60,000 +33.33% 32
Yorkshire -14 60 £68,000 +36.00% 40
North West -16 43 £65,000 +18.18% 53
Scotland -3 40 £72,500 +5.45% 22
East of England +44 32 £52,500 -16.00% 62
South West -34 23 £50,000 -32.20% 57
East Midlands -9 18 £75,000 +15.38% 34
North East -8 7 £67,500 +8.00% 15
Wales +5 5 £65,000 -18.75% 20

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 97 (10.66%) Apache Airflow
2 96 (10.55%) Apache Spark
3 55 (6.04%) Apache
4 14 (1.54%) SAS
5 12 (1.32%) Confluence
5 12 (1.32%) SharePoint
6 10 (1.10%) Appian
7 5 (0.55%) WordPress
8 3 (0.33%) Jupyter
8 3 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
8 3 (0.33%) Moodle
9 1 (0.11%) Apache Solr
9 1 (0.11%) Apache Superset
9 1 (0.11%) ArcGIS
9 1 (0.11%) GeoServer
9 1 (0.11%) Luigi
Applications
1 31 (3.41%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (0.99%) Microsoft Office
3 2 (0.22%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 1 (0.11%) Adobe XD
4 1 (0.11%) Notion
Business Applications
1 7 (0.77%) SAP S/4HANA
2 2 (0.22%) Markit EDM
2 2 (0.22%) Oracle EBS
3 1 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.11%) SAP ERP
3 1 (0.11%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 440 (48.35%) Azure
2 277 (30.44%) AWS
3 209 (22.97%) Power Platform
4 155 (17.03%) Snowflake
5 140 (15.38%) GCP
6 137 (15.05%) Azure Data Factory
7 86 (9.45%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 72 (7.91%) dbt
9 53 (5.82%) Azure DevOps
10 51 (5.60%) Amazon S3
11 43 (4.73%) SaaS
12 41 (4.51%) Serverless
13 38 (4.18%) GitHub
14 35 (3.85%) AWS Lambda
15 26 (2.86%) Fivetran
16 23 (2.53%) Amazon Kinesis
17 21 (2.31%) Amazon SageMaker
17 21 (2.31%) Azure Machine Learning
18 19 (2.09%) Amazon EMR
18 19 (2.09%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 3 (0.33%) DHCP
1 3 (0.33%) DNS
2 2 (0.22%) Broadband
2 2 (0.22%) Kerberos
3 1 (0.11%) DAB
Database & Business Intelligence
1 282 (30.99%) Data Warehouse
2 198 (21.76%) Power BI
3 134 (14.73%) Data Lake
4 126 (13.85%) SQL Server
5 81 (8.90%) Metadata
6 71 (7.80%) Tableau
7 56 (6.15%) Amazon Redshift
8 55 (6.04%) Big Data
9 48 (5.27%) NoSQL
10 42 (4.62%) Hadoop
11 41 (4.51%) PostgreSQL
12 39 (4.29%) BigQuery
13 38 (4.18%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 36 (3.96%) Delta Lake
15 35 (3.85%) MySQL
15 35 (3.85%) Relational Database
16 34 (3.74%) Looker
17 30 (3.30%) MongoDB
18 28 (3.08%) SQL Server Reporting Services
19 22 (2.42%) Pentaho
Development Applications
1 53 (5.82%) Git
2 31 (3.41%) MLflow
3 18 (1.98%) JIRA
4 11 (1.21%) Jenkins
5 7 (0.77%) GitLab
6 3 (0.33%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
7 1 (0.11%) CMake
7 1 (0.11%) Cucumber
7 1 (0.11%) Deequ
7 1 (0.11%) JMeter
7 1 (0.11%) Selenium
7 1 (0.11%) Team Foundation Server
7 1 (0.11%) Zephyr
General
1 294 (32.31%) Finance
2 236 (25.93%) Social Skills
3 120 (13.19%) Analytical Skills
4 75 (8.24%) Law
5 56 (6.15%) Banking
6 51 (5.60%) Public Sector
7 44 (4.84%) Marketing
8 38 (4.18%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 32 (3.52%) Retail
10 28 (3.08%) Manufacturing
11 26 (2.86%) Financial Institution
12 21 (2.31%) Legal
13 19 (2.09%) Advertising
14 13 (1.43%) Automotive
14 13 (1.43%) French Language
15 10 (1.10%) Front Office
16 8 (0.88%) Documentation Skills
17 7 (0.77%) Organisational Skills
17 7 (0.77%) Publishing
18 6 (0.66%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 404 (44.40%) Data Engineer
2 174 (19.12%) Senior
3 132 (14.51%) Lead
4 110 (12.09%) Senior Data Engineer
5 79 (8.68%) Architect
6 69 (7.58%) Lead Data Engineer
7 62 (6.81%) Data Architect
8 53 (5.82%) Data Manager
9 49 (5.38%) Developer
10 42 (4.62%) Analyst
11 39 (4.29%) Azure Engineer
12 36 (3.96%) Consultant
13 33 (3.63%) Azure Data Engineer
14 28 (3.08%) Engineering Manager
14 28 (3.08%) Principal Engineer
15 27 (2.97%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
15 27 (2.97%) AWS Engineer
16 23 (2.53%) AWS Data Engineer
17 20 (2.20%) Data Consultant
17 20 (2.20%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 92 (10.11%) PySpark
2 75 (8.24%) Kafka
3 47 (5.16%) PyTorch
3 47 (5.16%) TensorFlow
4 42 (4.62%) Pandas
5 23 (2.53%) REST
5 23 (2.53%) RESTful
5 23 (2.53%) scikit-learn
6 22 (2.42%) LangChain
7 18 (1.98%) pytest
7 18 (1.98%) React
8 17 (1.87%) FastAPI
8 17 (1.87%) NumPy
9 16 (1.76%) Faiss
10 15 (1.65%) Flask
11 14 (1.54%) HTML
11 14 (1.54%) Keras
11 14 (1.54%) Spring
11 14 (1.54%) XML
12 13 (1.43%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 54 (5.93%) Cloud Native
2 46 (5.05%) Product Ownership
3 43 (4.73%) Legacy Systems
4 38 (4.18%) Distributed Systems
5 35 (3.85%) Management Information System
6 23 (2.53%) Data Structures
7 22 (2.42%) Low-Code
8 21 (2.31%) e-Learning
9 20 (2.20%) Data Centre
10 19 (2.09%) Greenfield Project
11 17 (1.87%) Hybrid Cloud
12 15 (1.65%) Onboarding
13 14 (1.54%) Analytical Mindset
14 13 (1.43%) AI Agents
15 11 (1.21%) Distributed Architecture
15 11 (1.21%) Self-Motivation
16 10 (1.10%) FMCG
17 9 (0.99%) Algorithms
18 7 (0.77%) Enterprise Software
19 6 (0.66%) Reinsurance
Operating Systems
1 7 (0.77%) Linux
2 4 (0.44%) Unix
2 4 (0.44%) Windows
3 3 (0.33%) Windows Server
4 1 (0.11%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 441 (48.46%) Data Pipeline
2 431 (47.36%) Analytics
3 383 (42.09%) ETL
4 335 (36.81%) Data Modelling
5 265 (29.12%) Business Intelligence
6 258 (28.35%) AI
7 257 (28.24%) CI/CD
8 241 (26.48%) Data Governance
9 234 (25.71%) Agile
10 199 (21.87%) DevOps
11 182 (20.00%) Machine Learning
12 178 (19.56%) Data Integration
13 176 (19.34%) Data Science
14 175 (19.23%) Mentoring
15 165 (18.13%) Problem-Solving
16 162 (17.80%) Data Architecture
17 155 (17.03%) Decision-Making
18 120 (13.19%) Continuous Improvement
19 106 (11.65%) Data Management
19 106 (11.65%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 506 (55.60%) Python
2 493 (54.18%) SQL
3 82 (9.01%) Java
4 58 (6.37%) Scala
5 31 (3.41%) T-SQL
6 29 (3.19%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 23 (2.53%) Bash
8 21 (2.31%) PowerShell
8 21 (2.31%) R
9 17 (1.87%) JavaScript
10 16 (1.76%) C#
11 10 (1.10%) Bicep
11 10 (1.10%) Go
12 7 (0.77%) PHP
12 7 (0.77%) TypeScript
13 6 (0.66%) C++
14 3 (0.33%) Groovy
14 3 (0.33%) Ruby
15 2 (0.22%) PL/SQL
16 1 (0.11%) Korn
Qualifications
1 114 (12.53%) Degree
2 69 (7.58%) Security Cleared
3 46 (5.05%) Computer Science Degree
3 46 (5.05%) SC Cleared
4 35 (3.85%) Master's Degree
5 24 (2.64%) Microsoft Certification
6 19 (2.09%) DV Cleared
7 17 (1.87%) AWS Certification
8 16 (1.76%) Azure Certification
9 13 (1.43%) MCSE
10 12 (1.32%) CISSP
10 12 (1.32%) OCP
10 12 (1.32%) Oracle Certification
11 11 (1.21%) PhD
12 6 (0.66%) DBS Check
12 6 (0.66%) SnowPro
13 5 (0.55%) BPSS Clearance
13 5 (0.55%) CRISC
14 3 (0.33%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 2 (0.22%) MCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 227 (24.95%) Data Quality
2 66 (7.25%) Accessibility
3 55 (6.04%) GDPR
4 18 (1.98%) QA
5 12 (1.32%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 5 (0.55%) HIPAA
6 5 (0.55%) NIST
6 5 (0.55%) SLA
7 4 (0.44%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 2 (0.22%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 1 (0.11%) Actionable Recommendations
9 1 (0.11%) GAAP
9 1 (0.11%) GMP
9 1 (0.11%) GRC
9 1 (0.11%) IFRS
9 1 (0.11%) IFRS 17
9 1 (0.11%) NCSC
9 1 (0.11%) SOC 2
9 1 (0.11%) Solvency II
System Software
1 85 (9.34%) Docker
2 9 (0.99%) Active Directory
2 9 (0.99%) HDFS
3 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
3 1 (0.11%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 70 (7.69%) Kubernetes
2 60 (6.59%) Terraform
3 8 (0.88%) Argo
4 6 (0.66%) Ansible
4 6 (0.66%) Grafana
4 6 (0.66%) Prometheus
5 5 (0.55%) Control-M
5 5 (0.55%) Single Sign-On
6 4 (0.44%) Kubeflow
7 3 (0.33%) Active Directory Federation Services
7 3 (0.33%) Microsoft Intune
7 3 (0.33%) SCCM
8 1 (0.11%) Istio
8 1 (0.11%) Progress Chef
8 1 (0.11%) Puppet
Vendors
1 244 (26.81%) Databricks
2 199 (21.87%) Microsoft
3 49 (5.38%) Oracle
4 34 (3.74%) Informatica
5 30 (3.30%) Google
5 30 (3.30%) Palantir
6 29 (3.19%) OpenAI
6 29 (3.19%) Talend
7 24 (2.64%) Foundry
8 18 (1.98%) Dell
9 17 (1.87%) SAP
10 14 (1.54%) NVIDIA
11 10 (1.10%) Automation Anywhere
11 10 (1.10%) UiPath
12 7 (0.77%) MuleSoft
12 7 (0.77%) Salesforce
13 6 (0.66%) Cloudera
14 5 (0.55%) Dataiku
14 5 (0.55%) Netezza
15 4 (0.44%) CrowdStrike