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

6 months to
6 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 130 147 142
Rank change year-on-year +17 -5 +60
Permanent jobs citing Data Engineering 1,631 1,065 1,404
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.46% 2.15% 1.77%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.00% 2.43% 2.19%
Number of salaries quoted 1,163 458 683
10th Percentile £46,217 £46,000 £44,738
25th Percentile £55,425 £55,000 £56,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £80,000 £70,000 £71,500
Median % change year-on-year +14.29% -2.10% -4.67%
75th Percentile £100,000 £95,000 £91,250
90th Percentile £115,000 £112,500 £105,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £71,250 £65,000 £63,200
% change year-on-year +9.62% +2.85% -2.77%

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 81,483 43,799 64,049
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 72.97% 88.49% 80.62%
Number of salaries quoted 56,701 24,787 38,319
10th Percentile £31,250 £28,500 £31,250
25th Percentile £41,585 £36,250 £41,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,000 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £80,000 £75,000 £75,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £96,750 £95,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £47,500 £52,000
% change year-on-year +15.79% -8.65% -4.59%

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 6 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 6 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 +22 1,522 £80,000 +14.29% 1,214
UK excluding London -15 798 £71,250 +9.62% 610
London +29 731 £88,750 +2.90% 829
Work from Home +5 507 £80,000 +12.52% 494
North of England -7 363 £76,250 +12.96% 150
North West -26 173 £80,000 +36.75% 104
South East -44 155 £70,000 +7.69% 156
Midlands +16 107 £70,000 +3.70% 56
Yorkshire -12 101 £75,000 +8.70% 25
North East +8 89 £65,000 +36.84% 21
South West -25 79 £61,250 +2.08% 79
West Midlands 0 73 £70,000 +16.67% 38
East of England -7 50 £70,000 +40.00% 40
East Midlands -14 34 £63,750 -6.25% 18
Wales -39 24 £63,500 +26.69% 21
Scotland -17 23 £95,000 +31.03% 76
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 32

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
1 172 (10.55%) Apache Spark
2 148 (9.07%) Apache Airflow
3 131 (8.03%) Apache
4 28 (1.72%) Palantir Foundry
5 20 (1.23%) Jupyter
6 16 (0.98%) SAS
7 11 (0.67%) SharePoint
8 8 (0.49%) Confluence
9 4 (0.25%) Luigi
10 3 (0.18%) Moodle
11 2 (0.12%) Apache Superset
11 2 (0.12%) Tornado
12 1 (0.061%) Adobe Experience Manager
12 1 (0.061%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.061%) CMS
12 1 (0.061%) GeoServer
Applications
1 18 (1.10%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (0.55%) Spreadsheet
3 2 (0.12%) MS Visio
4 1 (0.061%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.061%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 4 (0.25%) IBM Planning Analytics
2 3 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.12%) SAP Business One
4 1 (0.061%) FastStats
4 1 (0.061%) Infor M3
4 1 (0.061%) NetSuite
4 1 (0.061%) Oracle Assets
4 1 (0.061%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.061%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.061%) SAP SD
Cloud Services
1 680 (41.69%) Azure
2 477 (29.25%) AWS
3 283 (17.35%) Power Platform
4 269 (16.49%) GCP
5 211 (12.94%) Snowflake
6 176 (10.79%) Azure Data Factory
7 149 (9.14%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 135 (8.28%) dbt
9 97 (5.95%) Serverless
10 91 (5.58%) Amazon S3
10 91 (5.58%) Azure DevOps
11 82 (5.03%) Azure Machine Learning
12 68 (4.17%) Azure AI
13 64 (3.92%) GitHub
14 60 (3.68%) SaaS
15 57 (3.49%) AWS Lambda
16 49 (3.00%) Amazon EMR
16 49 (3.00%) Azure Databricks
17 47 (2.88%) Microsoft Purview
18 38 (2.33%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 23 (1.41%) Broadband
2 7 (0.43%) Internet
3 4 (0.25%) 5G
4 2 (0.12%) Firewall
4 2 (0.12%) HTTP
4 2 (0.12%) MQTT
5 1 (0.061%) 4G
5 1 (0.061%) ATM
5 1 (0.061%) DAB
Database & Business Intelligence
1 297 (18.21%) Data Warehouse
2 271 (16.62%) Power BI
3 223 (13.67%) Data Lake
4 136 (8.34%) SQL Server
5 117 (7.17%) BigQuery
6 107 (6.56%) Tableau
7 102 (6.25%) Amazon Redshift
8 100 (6.13%) Metadata
9 87 (5.33%) Big Data
10 66 (4.05%) Azure SQL Database
11 62 (3.80%) NoSQL
12 60 (3.68%) Semantic Layer
13 59 (3.62%) Relational Database
14 58 (3.56%) Star Schema
15 57 (3.49%) Delta Lake
15 57 (3.49%) PostgreSQL
16 52 (3.19%) Spark SQL
17 46 (2.82%) Looker
18 42 (2.58%) Amazon Athena
19 41 (2.51%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 108 (6.62%) Git
2 34 (2.08%) Jenkins
3 22 (1.35%) GitLab
4 21 (1.29%) MLflow
5 19 (1.16%) JIRA
6 9 (0.55%) Claude Code
7 5 (0.31%) Poetry
8 4 (0.25%) Bitbucket
8 4 (0.25%) Selenium
9 3 (0.18%) Visual Studio Code
10 2 (0.12%) ERwin
10 2 (0.12%) Octopus Deploy
10 2 (0.12%) VSS/SourceSafe
11 1 (0.061%) IBM UrbanCode
11 1 (0.061%) kappa
11 1 (0.061%) RStudio
11 1 (0.061%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 1 (0.061%) Visual Studio
11 1 (0.061%) Yeoman
General
1 429 (26.30%) Finance
2 405 (24.83%) Social Skills
3 277 (16.98%) Analytical Skills
4 136 (8.34%) Public Sector
5 110 (6.74%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 70 (4.29%) Banking
7 57 (3.49%) Retail
8 55 (3.37%) Marketing
9 44 (2.70%) Legal
10 38 (2.33%) Law
11 37 (2.27%) Influencing Skills
12 30 (1.84%) Financial Institution
13 26 (1.59%) Manufacturing
14 25 (1.53%) Advertising
15 18 (1.10%) Games
16 12 (0.74%) Aerospace
17 11 (0.67%) Organisational Skills
17 11 (0.67%) Presentation Skills
18 10 (0.61%) Police
19 9 (0.55%) Documentation Skills
Job Titles
1 621 (38.07%) Data Engineer
2 356 (21.83%) Senior
3 301 (18.45%) Lead
4 173 (10.61%) Senior Data Engineer
5 141 (8.65%) Architect
6 115 (7.05%) Data Manager
7 100 (6.13%) Lead Data Engineer
8 99 (6.07%) Data Architect
9 73 (4.48%) Engineering Manager
10 72 (4.41%) Analyst
11 71 (4.35%) Principal Engineer
12 68 (4.17%) Consultant
13 67 (4.11%) Developer
14 60 (3.68%) Databricks Engineer
15 48 (2.94%) Head of Engineering
16 47 (2.88%) Data Consultant
16 47 (2.88%) Databricks Data Engineer
16 47 (2.88%) Software Engineer
17 44 (2.70%) Data Scientist
17 44 (2.70%) Principal Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 172 (10.55%) PySpark
2 125 (7.66%) Terraform
3 92 (5.64%) Kafka
4 41 (2.51%) LangChain
5 40 (2.45%) REST
6 37 (2.27%) .NET
7 35 (2.15%) PyTorch
7 35 (2.15%) scikit-learn
7 35 (2.15%) TensorFlow
8 34 (2.08%) LlamaIndex
9 27 (1.66%) Node.js
10 24 (1.47%) Pandas
11 21 (1.29%) pgvector
11 21 (1.29%) SpaCy
12 20 (1.23%) JSON
13 17 (1.04%) Apache NiFi
14 14 (0.86%) RESTful
15 11 (0.67%) ARM Templates
15 11 (0.67%) FastAPI
15 11 (0.67%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 178 (10.91%) Cloud Native
2 68 (4.17%) Data Structures
3 66 (4.05%) Product Ownership
4 53 (3.25%) Distributed Systems
5 42 (2.58%) Onboarding
6 31 (1.90%) AI Agents
7 27 (1.66%) e-Learning
8 21 (1.29%) Distributed Computing
9 20 (1.23%) Analytical Mindset
9 20 (1.23%) Low-Code
10 19 (1.16%) Legacy Systems
10 19 (1.16%) Management Information System
10 19 (1.16%) Self-Motivation
11 18 (1.10%) Public Cloud
12 17 (1.04%) Clustering
13 16 (0.98%) Greenfield Project
14 14 (0.86%) Distributed Architecture
14 14 (0.86%) Hedge funds
15 13 (0.80%) Hybrid Cloud
15 13 (0.80%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 7 (0.43%) Windows
2 5 (0.31%) Linux
3 1 (0.061%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 764 (46.84%) Analytics
2 618 (37.89%) AI
3 564 (34.58%) Data Pipeline
4 510 (31.27%) Data Modelling
5 455 (27.90%) ETL
6 418 (25.63%) Data Governance
7 415 (25.44%) CI/CD
8 411 (25.20%) Business Intelligence
9 398 (24.40%) Machine Learning
10 384 (23.54%) Agile
11 381 (23.36%) Decision-Making
12 361 (22.13%) Data Architecture
13 307 (18.82%) Mentoring
14 300 (18.39%) DevOps
15 277 (16.98%) Data Science
16 257 (15.76%) Problem-Solving
17 244 (14.96%) Roadmaps
18 214 (13.12%) Lakehouse
19 188 (11.53%) Continuous Improvement
20 187 (11.47%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 826 (50.64%) SQL
2 806 (49.42%) Python
3 123 (7.54%) Java
4 70 (4.29%) Scala
5 57 (3.49%) JavaScript
6 53 (3.25%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 32 (1.96%) C#
8 28 (1.72%) C++
9 27 (1.66%) R
10 24 (1.47%) TypeScript
11 18 (1.10%) Bash
12 16 (0.98%) Go
12 16 (0.98%) T-SQL
13 14 (0.86%) PowerShell
14 8 (0.49%) Groovy
15 7 (0.43%) Bicep
16 6 (0.37%) Julia
17 5 (0.31%) PL/SQL
17 5 (0.31%) VBA
18 4 (0.25%) Rust
Qualifications
1 170 (10.42%) Degree
2 152 (9.32%) Security Cleared
3 95 (5.82%) SC Cleared
4 57 (3.49%) Master's Degree
5 54 (3.31%) Computer Science Degree
6 44 (2.70%) Azure Certification
7 43 (2.64%) DV Cleared
8 35 (2.15%) DBS Check
9 29 (1.78%) BPSS Clearance
10 25 (1.53%) AWS Certification
11 22 (1.35%) PhD
12 14 (0.86%) ACCA
12 14 (0.86%) CIMA
13 13 (0.80%) Microsoft Certification
14 7 (0.43%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 6 (0.37%) Numerate Degree
16 4 (0.25%) CCA
17 3 (0.18%) CBAP
17 3 (0.18%) CISSP
17 3 (0.18%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 458 (28.08%) Data Quality
2 78 (4.78%) GDPR
3 54 (3.31%) Accessibility
4 39 (2.39%) QA
5 16 (0.98%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 15 (0.92%) GRC
7 9 (0.55%) Actionable Recommendations
8 7 (0.43%) PERC
9 6 (0.37%) NCSC
9 6 (0.37%) SLA
10 4 (0.25%) PMO
10 4 (0.25%) Solvency II
11 3 (0.18%) EU AI Act
11 3 (0.18%) PCI DSS
11 3 (0.18%) PSD2
12 2 (0.12%) ISO/IEC 42001
13 1 (0.061%) HIPAA
13 1 (0.061%) ISO/IEC 27001
13 1 (0.061%) NIST
System Software
1 94 (5.76%) Docker
2 56 (3.43%) Virtual Machines
3 6 (0.37%) Active Directory
4 3 (0.18%) VMware Infrastructure
5 2 (0.12%) NDS
6 1 (0.061%) Apache Flume
6 1 (0.061%) Embedded Firmware
6 1 (0.061%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 61 (3.74%) Kubernetes
2 14 (0.86%) Grafana
3 5 (0.31%) Prometheus
4 4 (0.25%) Ansible
4 4 (0.25%) Argo
5 3 (0.18%) Kibana
5 3 (0.18%) Microsoft Intune
5 3 (0.18%) SCCM
6 2 (0.12%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
6 2 (0.12%) Computer Incident Response Team
7 1 (0.061%) CASB
Vendors
1 440 (26.98%) Databricks
2 308 (18.88%) Microsoft
3 90 (5.52%) Google
4 41 (2.51%) Palantir
5 37 (2.27%) Foundry
6 32 (1.96%) Informatica
6 32 (1.96%) Oracle
7 29 (1.78%) Dell
7 29 (1.78%) SAP
8 26 (1.59%) OpenAI
9 23 (1.41%) Salesforce
10 19 (1.16%) Cloudera
11 15 (0.92%) Teradata
12 12 (0.74%) Denodo
13 11 (0.67%) Sage
14 9 (0.55%) Alteryx
15 5 (0.31%) MicroStrategy
16 4 (0.25%) Cognos
16 4 (0.25%) IBM
16 4 (0.25%) Talend