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

6 months to
15 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 141 137 173
Rank change year-on-year -4 +36 -51
Permanent jobs citing Data Engineering 1,264 996 1,574
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.39% 2.29% 1.63%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.88% 2.45% 1.92%
Number of salaries quoted 864 538 902
10th Percentile £45,223 £45,000 £41,492
25th Percentile £57,500 £55,000 £55,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £77,500 £80,000 £70,000
Median % change year-on-year -3.13% +14.29% -6.67%
75th Percentile £97,813 £115,000 £88,750
90th Percentile £115,000 £135,375 £105,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £70,000 £66,367 £65,000
% change year-on-year +5.47% +2.10% +7.89%

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 67,106 40,605 82,127
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.79% 93.31% 85.17%
Number of salaries quoted 43,167 22,159 59,545
10th Percentile £30,000 £30,000 £29,000
25th Percentile £40,000 £41,250 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £60,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year - +9.09% -10.10%
75th Percentile £78,750 £78,750 £72,500
90th Percentile £100,000 £101,250 £92,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £52,500 £52,500 £50,000
% change year-on-year - +5.00% -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 15 May 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 15 May 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 -2 1,127 £80,000 - 492
London +40 580 £85,000 -12.82% 250
UK excluding London -33 569 £70,000 +5.47% 285
Work from Home -5 417 £82,500 -2.94% 251
North of England -50 195 £80,000 +25.49% 97
South East -61 109 £70,000 - 80
Midlands +16 102 £65,000 +13.04% 47
North West -50 102 £90,000 +22.03% 46
Yorkshire -29 73 £67,500 +8.00% 27
West Midlands +10 72 £62,500 +8.70% 35
East of England +18 61 £65,000 +30.00% 9
South West -36 51 £50,000 -48.30% 35
Scotland +11 42 £83,750 +45.65% 12
East Midlands -12 28 £70,000 +7.69% 12
North East -24 20 £70,000 +33.33% 25
Wales -28 9 £65,000 -18.75% 7

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
1 184 (14.56%) Apache Airflow
2 137 (10.84%) Apache Spark
3 83 (6.57%) Apache
4 35 (2.77%) Palantir Foundry
5 20 (1.58%) SAS
6 15 (1.19%) SharePoint
7 11 (0.87%) Appian
8 10 (0.79%) Confluence
9 7 (0.55%) Moodle
10 5 (0.40%) Jupyter
11 4 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
12 2 (0.16%) Luigi
13 1 (0.079%) ArcGIS
13 1 (0.079%) Camunda
13 1 (0.079%) GeoServer
13 1 (0.079%) WordPress
Applications
1 23 (1.82%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (0.71%) Spreadsheet
3 2 (0.16%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 3 (0.24%) Markit EDM
1 3 (0.24%) SAP S/4HANA
1 3 (0.24%) SAP SD
2 2 (0.16%) Unit4 Business World
3 1 (0.079%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.079%) Infor M3
3 1 (0.079%) Oracle Assets
3 1 (0.079%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.079%) Primavera
Cloud Services
1 616 (48.73%) Azure
2 404 (31.96%) AWS
3 235 (18.59%) Snowflake
4 223 (17.64%) Power Platform
5 219 (17.33%) GCP
6 164 (12.97%) Azure Data Factory
7 151 (11.95%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 121 (9.57%) dbt
9 85 (6.72%) Azure Machine Learning
10 79 (6.25%) Amazon S3
11 77 (6.09%) Azure AI
12 67 (5.30%) Serverless
13 66 (5.22%) Azure DevOps
14 51 (4.03%) GitHub
15 33 (2.61%) AWS Lambda
15 33 (2.61%) SaaS
16 29 (2.29%) GitHub Actions
17 27 (2.14%) Power Automate
18 25 (1.98%) Amazon Kinesis
18 25 (1.98%) Vertex AI
Communications & Networking
1 18 (1.42%) Broadband
2 4 (0.32%) HTTP
3 2 (0.16%) 4G
3 2 (0.16%) 5G
3 2 (0.16%) DAB
3 2 (0.16%) DHCP
3 2 (0.16%) DNS
3 2 (0.16%) Firewall
3 2 (0.16%) MQTT
4 1 (0.079%) Kerberos
4 1 (0.079%) Radio Access Network
Database & Business Intelligence
1 276 (21.84%) Data Warehouse
2 212 (16.77%) Power BI
3 200 (15.82%) Data Lake
4 154 (12.18%) SQL Server
5 105 (8.31%) BigQuery
6 103 (8.15%) Tableau
7 88 (6.96%) Amazon Redshift
8 87 (6.88%) Metadata
9 58 (4.59%) Relational Database
10 50 (3.96%) Delta Lake
11 48 (3.80%) Spark SQL
12 47 (3.72%) Elasticsearch
13 46 (3.64%) Looker
14 43 (3.40%) NoSQL
14 43 (3.40%) Semantic Layer
15 42 (3.32%) Big Data
15 42 (3.32%) PostgreSQL
15 42 (3.32%) Snowflake Schema
16 40 (3.16%) Azure SQL Database
16 40 (3.16%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 90 (7.12%) Git
2 60 (4.75%) MLflow
3 19 (1.50%) Jenkins
3 19 (1.50%) JIRA
4 13 (1.03%) GitLab
5 12 (0.95%) IBM UrbanCode
6 7 (0.55%) Selenium
7 4 (0.32%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
8 3 (0.24%) Claude Code
9 1 (0.079%) Bitbucket
9 1 (0.079%) CMake
9 1 (0.079%) Cucumber
9 1 (0.079%) Deequ
9 1 (0.079%) JMeter
9 1 (0.079%) RStudio
9 1 (0.079%) Team Foundation Server
9 1 (0.079%) Visual Studio
9 1 (0.079%) Yeoman
9 1 (0.079%) Zephyr
General
1 314 (24.84%) Finance
2 241 (19.07%) Social Skills
3 197 (15.59%) Analytical Skills
4 75 (5.93%) Public Sector
5 68 (5.38%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 62 (4.91%) Banking
7 52 (4.11%) Retail
8 37 (2.93%) Influencing Skills
9 33 (2.61%) Legal
10 31 (2.45%) Marketing
11 30 (2.37%) Law
12 16 (1.27%) Manufacturing
13 14 (1.11%) Advertising
13 14 (1.11%) Financial Institution
14 13 (1.03%) Investment Banking
15 11 (0.87%) Automotive
15 11 (0.87%) Games
16 10 (0.79%) Front Office
17 9 (0.71%) Publishing
18 8 (0.63%) Documentation Skills
Job Titles
1 498 (39.40%) Data Engineer
2 245 (19.38%) Senior
3 225 (17.80%) Lead
4 125 (9.89%) Senior Data Engineer
5 106 (8.39%) Data Manager
6 100 (7.91%) Architect
7 96 (7.59%) Lead Data Engineer
8 80 (6.33%) Data Architect
9 70 (5.54%) Consultant
10 69 (5.46%) Engineering Manager
11 50 (3.96%) Data Consultant
12 43 (3.40%) Developer
13 42 (3.32%) Platform Engineer
14 41 (3.24%) Analyst
15 39 (3.09%) Principal Engineer
16 37 (2.93%) Azure Engineer
17 36 (2.85%) AWS Engineer
18 33 (2.61%) Finance Manager
19 32 (2.53%) Technical Leader
20 29 (2.29%) AWS Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 140 (11.08%) PySpark
2 98 (7.75%) Kafka
3 62 (4.91%) PyTorch
3 62 (4.91%) TensorFlow
4 45 (3.56%) scikit-learn
5 43 (3.40%) REST
6 40 (3.16%) LangChain
7 32 (2.53%) Pandas
8 27 (2.14%) pgvector
9 25 (1.98%) LlamaIndex
10 20 (1.58%) .NET
10 20 (1.58%) Faiss
10 20 (1.58%) RESTful
11 18 (1.42%) Node.js
12 17 (1.34%) HTML
13 16 (1.27%) React
14 15 (1.19%) pytest
15 14 (1.11%) CSS
15 14 (1.11%) FastAPI
15 14 (1.11%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 110 (8.70%) Cloud Native
2 51 (4.03%) Product Ownership
3 45 (3.56%) Distributed Systems
4 41 (3.24%) Data Structures
5 33 (2.61%) Low-Code
6 31 (2.45%) Legacy Systems
7 27 (2.14%) Public Cloud
8 24 (1.90%) Self-Motivation
9 23 (1.82%) Clustering
10 21 (1.66%) Management Information System
11 20 (1.58%) e-Learning
12 17 (1.34%) Analytical Mindset
12 17 (1.34%) Onboarding
13 15 (1.19%) Greenfield Project
14 13 (1.03%) NHS
14 13 (1.03%) Social Media
15 11 (0.87%) AI Agents
16 10 (0.79%) Cyberattack
16 10 (0.79%) Hybrid Cloud
17 9 (0.71%) Reinsurance
Operating Systems
1 7 (0.55%) Linux
2 5 (0.40%) Windows
3 2 (0.16%) Windows Server
4 1 (0.079%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 607 (48.02%) Analytics
2 518 (40.98%) Data Pipeline
3 450 (35.60%) AI
4 436 (34.49%) Data Modelling
5 417 (32.99%) ETL
6 372 (29.43%) Data Governance
7 329 (26.03%) CI/CD
8 328 (25.95%) Business Intelligence
9 312 (24.68%) Agile
10 301 (23.81%) Data Architecture
11 290 (22.94%) Machine Learning
12 227 (17.96%) DevOps
13 226 (17.88%) Data Science
13 226 (17.88%) Decision-Making
14 205 (16.22%) Problem-Solving
15 204 (16.14%) Mentoring
16 185 (14.64%) Roadmaps
17 140 (11.08%) Data Integration
18 138 (10.92%) Continuous Improvement
19 131 (10.36%) Use Case
Programming Languages
1 658 (52.06%) Python
2 644 (50.95%) SQL
3 111 (8.78%) Java
4 56 (4.43%) Scala
5 37 (2.93%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 35 (2.77%) Bash
7 33 (2.61%) JavaScript
8 30 (2.37%) R
9 25 (1.98%) Go
10 22 (1.74%) PowerShell
11 19 (1.50%) C#
12 15 (1.19%) T-SQL
13 14 (1.11%) TypeScript
14 11 (0.87%) C++
15 6 (0.47%) Bicep
15 6 (0.47%) Julia
15 6 (0.47%) PHP
16 4 (0.32%) Rust
16 4 (0.32%) VBA
17 3 (0.24%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 144 (11.39%) Degree
2 79 (6.25%) Security Cleared
3 57 (4.51%) Computer Science Degree
4 46 (3.64%) SC Cleared
5 39 (3.09%) Master's Degree
6 32 (2.53%) DBS Check
7 27 (2.14%) Azure Certification
8 21 (1.66%) DV Cleared
9 13 (1.03%) AWS Certification
9 13 (1.03%) Microsoft Certification
10 8 (0.63%) PhD
11 7 (0.55%) BPSS Clearance
12 5 (0.40%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 3 (0.24%) CISSP
14 2 (0.16%) CCA
14 2 (0.16%) CompTIA Security+
14 2 (0.16%) GIAC
14 2 (0.16%) SANS
15 1 (0.079%) CBAP
15 1 (0.079%) CEH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 369 (29.19%) Data Quality
2 92 (7.28%) GDPR
3 37 (2.93%) California Consumer Privacy Act
4 34 (2.69%) Accessibility
5 23 (1.82%) GRC
6 20 (1.58%) QA
7 17 (1.34%) HIPAA
8 14 (1.11%) SLA
9 9 (0.71%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 7 (0.55%) NIST
10 7 (0.55%) PERC
11 5 (0.40%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 4 (0.32%) Solvency II
13 1 (0.079%) Actionable Recommendations
13 1 (0.079%) GMP
13 1 (0.079%) NCSC
13 1 (0.079%) PMO
System Software
1 92 (7.28%) Docker
2 57 (4.51%) Virtual Machines
3 11 (0.87%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.079%) Apache Flume
Systems Management
1 100 (7.91%) Terraform
2 71 (5.62%) Kubernetes
3 13 (1.03%) Grafana
4 10 (0.79%) Prometheus
5 9 (0.71%) Argo
5 9 (0.71%) Single Sign-On
6 6 (0.47%) Control-M
7 5 (0.40%) Ansible
7 5 (0.40%) Microsoft Intune
7 5 (0.40%) SCCM
8 2 (0.16%) Active Directory Federation Services
8 2 (0.16%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
8 2 (0.16%) Computer Incident Response Team
9 1 (0.079%) Kibana
9 1 (0.079%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 418 (33.07%) Databricks
2 235 (18.59%) Microsoft
3 58 (4.59%) Google
3 58 (4.59%) Informatica
4 52 (4.11%) Dell
5 51 (4.03%) Palantir
6 46 (3.64%) Oracle
7 41 (3.24%) Foundry
8 38 (3.01%) OpenAI
9 30 (2.37%) Cloudera
10 25 (1.98%) Denodo
10 25 (1.98%) Talend
10 25 (1.98%) Teradata
11 21 (1.66%) Salesforce
12 13 (1.03%) Red Hat
13 12 (0.95%) Automation Anywhere
13 12 (0.95%) UiPath
14 11 (0.87%) SAP
15 7 (0.55%) MicroStrategy
15 7 (0.55%) MuleSoft