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

6 months to
1 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 129 151 135
Rank change year-on-year +22 -16 +35
Permanent jobs citing Data Engineering 1,526 1,060 1,607
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.48% 2.14% 1.87%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.01% 2.39% 2.30%
Number of salaries quoted 1,096 463 761
10th Percentile £45,000 £46,250 £42,500
25th Percentile £56,250 £57,500 £56,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £80,000 £75,000 £71,500
Median % change year-on-year +6.67% +4.90% -4.67%
75th Percentile £100,000 £97,500 £90,822
90th Percentile £115,000 £115,000 £107,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £75,000 £67,500 £63,500
% change year-on-year +11.11% +6.30% +1.60%

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 76,038 44,320 69,725
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.68% 89.51% 81.15%
Number of salaries quoted 52,466 25,228 46,329
10th Percentile £30,603 £28,500 £30,500
25th Percentile £41,250 £37,500 £40,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% - -8.41%
75th Percentile £78,750 £76,250 £75,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £97,500 £95,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £50,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year +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 1 August 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 1 August 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 +29 1,433 £80,000 +6.67% 800
UK excluding London -18 723 £75,000 +11.11% 405
London +41 705 £90,000 - 495
Work from Home +12 454 £82,500 +10.00% 369
North of England 0 316 £78,750 +15.81% 126
North West -10 166 £80,000 +18.52% 63
South East -67 135 £70,000 +7.69% 125
Midlands +18 101 £72,500 +11.54% 36
Yorkshire +3 93 £75,000 +7.14% 41
South West -31 73 £60,000 -14.29% 58
West Midlands +8 70 £72,500 +20.83% 26
East of England +12 63 £70,000 +40.00% 18
North East -5 57 £67,500 +42.11% 23
East Midlands -15 31 £63,750 -6.25% 10
Scotland -11 21 £92,500 +60.87% 23
Wales -52 14 £60,000 -13.04% 6

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
1 185 (12.12%) Apache Spark
2 182 (11.93%) Apache Airflow
3 122 (7.99%) Apache
4 25 (1.64%) Palantir Foundry
5 19 (1.25%) SAS
6 18 (1.18%) Jupyter
7 11 (0.72%) SharePoint
8 8 (0.52%) Confluence
9 4 (0.26%) Moodle
10 3 (0.20%) Luigi
11 1 (0.066%) Adobe Experience Manager
11 1 (0.066%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.066%) GeoServer
11 1 (0.066%) Tornado
Applications
1 21 (1.38%) Microsoft Excel
2 10 (0.66%) Spreadsheet
3 2 (0.13%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.066%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.066%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 3 (0.20%) SAP S/4HANA
1 3 (0.20%) SAP SD
2 2 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
2 2 (0.13%) Markit EDM
2 2 (0.13%) SAP Business One
2 2 (0.13%) Unit4 Business World
3 1 (0.066%) FastStats
3 1 (0.066%) Infor M3
3 1 (0.066%) NetSuite
3 1 (0.066%) Oracle Assets
3 1 (0.066%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.066%) Primavera
Cloud Services
1 683 (44.76%) Azure
2 494 (32.37%) AWS
3 273 (17.89%) GCP
4 267 (17.50%) Power Platform
5 242 (15.86%) Snowflake
6 162 (10.62%) Azure Data Factory
7 150 (9.83%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 143 (9.37%) dbt
9 91 (5.96%) Amazon S3
10 80 (5.24%) Azure Machine Learning
10 80 (5.24%) Serverless
11 78 (5.11%) Azure DevOps
12 67 (4.39%) Azure AI
13 51 (3.34%) SaaS
14 50 (3.28%) GitHub
15 40 (2.62%) Microsoft Purview
16 36 (2.36%) AWS Lambda
17 30 (1.97%) Amazon EMR
18 24 (1.57%) AWS CloudFormation
18 24 (1.57%) GitHub Actions
Communications & Networking
1 29 (1.90%) Broadband
2 7 (0.46%) Internet
3 5 (0.33%) 5G
4 3 (0.20%) DAB
4 3 (0.20%) HTTP
5 2 (0.13%) 4G
5 2 (0.13%) Firewall
5 2 (0.13%) MQTT
6 1 (0.066%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 292 (19.13%) Data Warehouse
2 255 (16.71%) Power BI
3 214 (14.02%) Data Lake
4 144 (9.44%) SQL Server
5 127 (8.32%) BigQuery
6 120 (7.86%) Tableau
7 107 (7.01%) Amazon Redshift
8 93 (6.09%) Metadata
9 77 (5.05%) Big Data
10 70 (4.59%) Relational Database
11 62 (4.06%) NoSQL
12 60 (3.93%) Azure SQL Database
13 56 (3.67%) Delta Lake
13 56 (3.67%) PostgreSQL
13 56 (3.67%) Semantic Layer
14 53 (3.47%) Star Schema
15 52 (3.41%) Elasticsearch
16 50 (3.28%) Looker
16 50 (3.28%) Spark SQL
17 43 (2.82%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 104 (6.82%) Git
2 34 (2.23%) MLflow
3 33 (2.16%) Jenkins
4 22 (1.44%) GitLab
5 18 (1.18%) JIRA
6 12 (0.79%) IBM UrbanCode
7 7 (0.46%) Claude Code
8 5 (0.33%) Selenium
9 4 (0.26%) Bitbucket
10 3 (0.20%) Visual Studio Code
11 2 (0.13%) ERwin
11 2 (0.13%) VSS/SourceSafe
12 1 (0.066%) RStudio
12 1 (0.066%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
12 1 (0.066%) Visual Studio
12 1 (0.066%) Yeoman
General
1 381 (24.97%) Finance
2 340 (22.28%) Social Skills
3 255 (16.71%) Analytical Skills
4 94 (6.16%) Public Sector
5 92 (6.03%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 69 (4.52%) Banking
7 59 (3.87%) Retail
8 44 (2.88%) Influencing Skills
9 42 (2.75%) Legal
10 39 (2.56%) Marketing
11 33 (2.16%) Law
12 26 (1.70%) Financial Institution
13 22 (1.44%) Advertising
14 18 (1.18%) Games
14 18 (1.18%) Manufacturing
15 12 (0.79%) Investment Banking
16 9 (0.59%) Front Office
17 8 (0.52%) Aerospace
17 8 (0.52%) Presentation Skills
18 7 (0.46%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 575 (37.68%) Data Engineer
2 336 (22.02%) Senior
3 268 (17.56%) Lead
4 163 (10.68%) Senior Data Engineer
5 134 (8.78%) Architect
6 110 (7.21%) Data Manager
7 97 (6.36%) Data Architect
8 91 (5.96%) Lead Data Engineer
9 70 (4.59%) Engineering Manager
10 69 (4.52%) Consultant
11 64 (4.19%) Analyst
12 62 (4.06%) Principal Engineer
13 52 (3.41%) Developer
14 50 (3.28%) Data Consultant
15 48 (3.15%) Head of Engineering
16 46 (3.01%) Python Engineer
17 37 (2.42%) Platform Engineer
18 36 (2.36%) Data Scientist
18 36 (2.36%) Principal Data Engineer
19 35 (2.29%) AWS Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 151 (9.90%) PySpark
2 105 (6.88%) Kafka
3 41 (2.69%) LangChain
4 40 (2.62%) TensorFlow
5 39 (2.56%) PyTorch
5 39 (2.56%) scikit-learn
6 36 (2.36%) REST
7 33 (2.16%) LlamaIndex
8 28 (1.83%) pgvector
9 27 (1.77%) Node.js
10 23 (1.51%) Pandas
11 22 (1.44%) .NET
12 17 (1.11%) JSON
13 16 (1.05%) SpaCy
14 15 (0.98%) Apache NiFi
15 14 (0.92%) RESTful
16 12 (0.79%) ARM Templates
17 11 (0.72%) FastAPI
18 10 (0.66%) HTML
18 10 (0.66%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 159 (10.42%) Cloud Native
2 76 (4.98%) Data Structures
3 58 (3.80%) Product Ownership
4 53 (3.47%) Distributed Systems
5 34 (2.23%) Onboarding
6 27 (1.77%) e-Learning
7 26 (1.70%) Low-Code
7 26 (1.70%) Public Cloud
8 25 (1.64%) Clustering
9 24 (1.57%) AI Agents
10 23 (1.51%) Greenfield Project
11 21 (1.38%) Analytical Mindset
12 18 (1.18%) Legacy Systems
12 18 (1.18%) Self-Motivation
13 17 (1.11%) Management Information System
14 15 (0.98%) Distributed Computing
15 14 (0.92%) Social Media
16 13 (0.85%) IoT
17 12 (0.79%) Hedge funds
18 11 (0.72%) Reinsurance
Operating Systems
1 7 (0.46%) Linux
1 7 (0.46%) Windows
2 1 (0.066%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 732 (47.97%) Analytics
2 582 (38.14%) AI
3 553 (36.24%) Data Pipeline
4 500 (32.77%) Data Modelling
5 437 (28.64%) Data Governance
6 425 (27.85%) ETL
7 384 (25.16%) Business Intelligence
8 374 (24.51%) CI/CD
9 371 (24.31%) Agile
10 360 (23.59%) Machine Learning
11 349 (22.87%) Data Architecture
12 331 (21.69%) Decision-Making
13 276 (18.09%) Mentoring
14 274 (17.96%) DevOps
15 257 (16.84%) Data Science
16 235 (15.40%) Problem-Solving
17 228 (14.94%) Roadmaps
18 181 (11.86%) Continuous Improvement
19 152 (9.96%) Use Case
20 148 (9.70%) Data Strategy
Programming Languages
1 781 (51.18%) Python
2 764 (50.07%) SQL
3 115 (7.54%) Java
4 65 (4.26%) Scala
5 45 (2.95%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 42 (2.75%) JavaScript
7 29 (1.90%) R
8 21 (1.38%) TypeScript
9 18 (1.18%) Bash
9 18 (1.18%) C#
10 17 (1.11%) Go
10 17 (1.11%) PowerShell
11 16 (1.05%) C++
12 14 (0.92%) T-SQL
13 8 (0.52%) Groovy
14 7 (0.46%) Bicep
14 7 (0.46%) VBA
15 6 (0.39%) Julia
16 5 (0.33%) PL/SQL
17 4 (0.26%) Rust
Qualifications
1 163 (10.68%) Degree
2 131 (8.58%) Security Cleared
3 82 (5.37%) SC Cleared
4 53 (3.47%) Computer Science Degree
5 47 (3.08%) Master's Degree
6 39 (2.56%) Azure Certification
7 38 (2.49%) DV Cleared
8 34 (2.23%) DBS Check
9 20 (1.31%) AWS Certification
10 19 (1.25%) BPSS Clearance
11 18 (1.18%) PhD
12 10 (0.66%) ACCA
12 10 (0.66%) CIMA
12 10 (0.66%) Microsoft Certification
13 5 (0.33%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 4 (0.26%) CCA
15 3 (0.20%) CISSP
15 3 (0.20%) PMI Certification
16 2 (0.13%) CBAP
16 2 (0.13%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 425 (27.85%) Data Quality
2 102 (6.68%) GDPR
3 47 (3.08%) Accessibility
4 37 (2.42%) QA
5 35 (2.29%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 18 (1.18%) GRC
7 13 (0.85%) HIPAA
8 7 (0.46%) PERC
8 7 (0.46%) SLA
9 4 (0.26%) Actionable Recommendations
9 4 (0.26%) PMO
9 4 (0.26%) Solvency II
10 3 (0.20%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 3 (0.20%) PCI DSS
10 3 (0.20%) PSD2
11 2 (0.13%) NCSC
11 2 (0.13%) NIST
12 1 (0.066%) EU AI Act
12 1 (0.066%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 98 (6.42%) Docker
2 56 (3.67%) Virtual Machines
3 7 (0.46%) Active Directory
4 3 (0.20%) VMware Infrastructure
5 2 (0.13%) NDS
6 1 (0.066%) Apache Flume
6 1 (0.066%) Embedded Firmware
6 1 (0.066%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 129 (8.45%) Terraform
2 64 (4.19%) Kubernetes
3 17 (1.11%) Grafana
4 10 (0.66%) Prometheus
5 6 (0.39%) Ansible
6 4 (0.26%) Argo
7 3 (0.20%) Kibana
7 3 (0.20%) Microsoft Intune
7 3 (0.20%) SCCM
8 2 (0.13%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
8 2 (0.13%) Computer Incident Response Team
8 2 (0.13%) Control-M
8 2 (0.13%) Single Sign-On
9 1 (0.066%) CASB
9 1 (0.066%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 448 (29.36%) Databricks
2 279 (18.28%) Microsoft
3 83 (5.44%) Google
4 49 (3.21%) Oracle
5 48 (3.15%) Dell
5 48 (3.15%) Informatica
6 42 (2.75%) Palantir
7 33 (2.16%) Foundry
7 33 (2.16%) SAP
8 27 (1.77%) Cloudera
9 26 (1.70%) Salesforce
9 26 (1.70%) Teradata
10 24 (1.57%) Denodo
10 24 (1.57%) OpenAI
11 12 (0.79%) Red Hat
12 10 (0.66%) Sage
13 7 (0.46%) Alteryx
13 7 (0.46%) MicroStrategy
13 7 (0.46%) Talend
14 6 (0.39%) Cognos