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

6 months to
20 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 131 149 155
Rank change year-on-year +18 +6 +47
Permanent jobs citing Data Engineering 1,655 1,059 1,319
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.42% 2.15% 1.69%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.95% 2.42% 2.08%
Number of salaries quoted 1,165 477 656
10th Percentile £46,217 £46,000 £44,244
25th Percentile £55,500 £55,000 £56,188
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £77,500 £70,000 £70,000
Median % change year-on-year +10.71% - -6.67%
75th Percentile £100,000 £95,000 £92,500
90th Percentile £112,500 £112,500 £106,250
UK excluding London median annual salary £70,000 £65,000 £62,500
% change year-on-year +7.69% +4.00% -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 84,898 43,727 63,303
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.06% 88.69% 81.28%
Number of salaries quoted 58,675 24,676 35,715
10th Percentile £31,250 £28,500 £32,000
25th Percentile £41,750 £36,250 £42,500
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 £77,500
90th Percentile £100,000 £96,313 £95,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £47,500 £52,500
% change year-on-year +15.79% -9.52% -2.78%

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 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 20 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 +16 1,531 £79,750 +13.93% 2,056
UK excluding London -16 824 £70,000 +7.69% 894
London +23 730 £87,500 +2.94% 1,346
Work from Home +3 509 £77,500 +9.93% 853
North of England -12 375 £75,000 +11.11% 246
North West -25 176 £80,000 +36.75% 149
South East -52 152 £65,000 - 219
Midlands +4 113 £75,000 +11.11% 119
North East +20 100 £66,805 +40.64% 39
Yorkshire -3 99 £75,000 +7.14% 58
South West -14 88 £62,500 +4.17% 101
West Midlands -10 78 £75,000 +25.00% 90
East of England -25 39 £70,000 +40.00% 56
East Midlands -20 35 £75,000 +10.29% 29
Scotland -1 32 £100,000 +37.93% 83
Wales -41 28 £63,500 +26.69% 15
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 55

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
1 171 (10.33%) Apache Spark
2 139 (8.40%) Apache Airflow
3 128 (7.73%) Apache
4 23 (1.39%) Palantir Foundry
5 21 (1.27%) Jupyter
6 13 (0.79%) SAS
7 12 (0.73%) Confluence
8 10 (0.60%) SharePoint
9 9 (0.54%) Oracle Workflow
10 4 (0.24%) Luigi
11 2 (0.12%) Adobe Experience Manager
11 2 (0.12%) Apache Superset
11 2 (0.12%) Tornado
12 1 (0.060%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.060%) CMS
12 1 (0.060%) GeoServer
12 1 (0.060%) Moodle
Applications
1 19 (1.15%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.48%) Spreadsheet
3 6 (0.36%) MS Visio
4 2 (0.12%) Microsoft Office
5 1 (0.060%) Chatbot
5 1 (0.060%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 1 (0.060%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 5 (0.30%) IBM Planning Analytics
2 4 (0.24%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.12%) SAP Business One
4 1 (0.060%) Academy Revenues and Benefits
4 1 (0.060%) FastStats
4 1 (0.060%) Infor M3
4 1 (0.060%) NetSuite
4 1 (0.060%) Oracle Assets
4 1 (0.060%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.060%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.060%) SAP SD
Cloud Services
1 682 (41.21%) Azure
2 478 (28.88%) AWS
3 287 (17.34%) Power Platform
4 273 (16.50%) GCP
5 191 (11.54%) Snowflake
6 186 (11.24%) Azure Data Factory
7 134 (8.10%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 134 (8.10%) dbt
8 104 (6.28%) Azure DevOps
9 99 (5.98%) Amazon S3
10 98 (5.92%) Serverless
11 67 (4.05%) Azure Machine Learning
12 66 (3.99%) AWS Lambda
13 65 (3.93%) GitHub
14 63 (3.81%) SaaS
15 52 (3.14%) Azure AI
16 51 (3.08%) Amazon EMR
17 50 (3.02%) Azure Databricks
18 47 (2.84%) Microsoft Purview
19 41 (2.48%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 17 (1.03%) Broadband
2 7 (0.42%) Internet
3 4 (0.24%) 5G
4 2 (0.12%) Firewall
4 2 (0.12%) HTTP
4 2 (0.12%) MQTT
5 1 (0.060%) 4G
5 1 (0.060%) ATM
5 1 (0.060%) DAB
5 1 (0.060%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 296 (17.89%) Data Warehouse
2 277 (16.74%) Power BI
3 219 (13.23%) Data Lake
4 117 (7.07%) SQL Server
5 113 (6.83%) BigQuery
6 107 (6.47%) Amazon Redshift
7 106 (6.40%) Metadata
8 104 (6.28%) Tableau
9 86 (5.20%) Big Data
10 71 (4.29%) Azure SQL Database
11 65 (3.93%) NoSQL
12 60 (3.63%) Semantic Layer
13 59 (3.56%) Relational Database
14 58 (3.50%) Delta Lake
15 56 (3.38%) Star Schema
16 50 (3.02%) Amazon Athena
16 50 (3.02%) PostgreSQL
17 48 (2.90%) Spark SQL
18 38 (2.30%) Looker
19 35 (2.11%) Data Vault
Development Applications
1 127 (7.67%) Git
2 36 (2.18%) Jenkins
3 27 (1.63%) GitLab
4 24 (1.45%) JIRA
5 15 (0.91%) MLflow
6 10 (0.60%) Claude Code
7 5 (0.30%) Poetry
8 4 (0.24%) Octopus Deploy
8 4 (0.24%) Visual Studio Code
9 3 (0.18%) Bitbucket
9 3 (0.18%) Selenium
10 2 (0.12%) ERwin
10 2 (0.12%) RStudio
10 2 (0.12%) VSS/SourceSafe
11 1 (0.060%) kappa
11 1 (0.060%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 1 (0.060%) Visual Studio
11 1 (0.060%) Yeoman
General
1 423 (25.56%) Finance
2 422 (25.50%) Social Skills
3 286 (17.28%) Analytical Skills
4 145 (8.76%) Public Sector
5 109 (6.59%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 73 (4.41%) Banking
7 61 (3.69%) Retail
8 54 (3.26%) Marketing
9 45 (2.72%) Legal
10 38 (2.30%) Influencing Skills
11 37 (2.24%) Law
12 32 (1.93%) Financial Institution
13 26 (1.57%) Manufacturing
14 21 (1.27%) Advertising
15 13 (0.79%) Games
15 13 (0.79%) Organisational Skills
15 13 (0.79%) Presentation Skills
16 12 (0.73%) Aerospace
17 10 (0.60%) Pharmaceutical
17 10 (0.60%) Police
Job Titles
1 657 (39.70%) Data Engineer
2 366 (22.11%) Senior
3 299 (18.07%) Lead
4 190 (11.48%) Senior Data Engineer
5 139 (8.40%) Architect
6 105 (6.34%) Data Manager
7 97 (5.86%) Data Architect
7 97 (5.86%) Lead Data Engineer
8 77 (4.65%) Analyst
9 73 (4.41%) Principal Engineer
10 71 (4.29%) Developer
11 62 (3.75%) Engineering Manager
12 61 (3.69%) Consultant
12 61 (3.69%) Software Engineer
13 55 (3.32%) Databricks Engineer
14 46 (2.78%) Head of Engineering
15 45 (2.72%) Principal Data Engineer
16 44 (2.66%) Data Scientist
16 44 (2.66%) Databricks Data Engineer
17 42 (2.54%) Data Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 184 (11.12%) PySpark
2 129 (7.79%) Terraform
3 87 (5.26%) Kafka
4 41 (2.48%) .NET
5 39 (2.36%) LangChain
6 35 (2.11%) REST
7 32 (1.93%) LlamaIndex
8 31 (1.87%) PyTorch
8 31 (1.87%) scikit-learn
8 31 (1.87%) TensorFlow
9 28 (1.69%) Pandas
10 27 (1.63%) Node.js
11 23 (1.39%) SpaCy
12 22 (1.33%) JSON
13 16 (0.97%) Apache NiFi
13 16 (0.97%) pgvector
14 15 (0.91%) RESTful
15 12 (0.73%) React
15 12 (0.73%) YAML
16 11 (0.66%) FastAPI
Miscellaneous
1 185 (11.18%) Cloud Native
2 67 (4.05%) Data Structures
3 62 (3.75%) Product Ownership
4 55 (3.32%) Distributed Systems
5 48 (2.90%) Onboarding
6 36 (2.18%) AI Agents
7 25 (1.51%) e-Learning
8 21 (1.27%) Self-Motivation
9 20 (1.21%) Analytical Mindset
10 19 (1.15%) Distributed Computing
10 19 (1.15%) Legacy Systems
11 17 (1.03%) Management Information System
12 16 (0.97%) Greenfield Project
12 16 (0.97%) Hedge funds
13 15 (0.91%) Hybrid Cloud
13 15 (0.91%) Low-Code
14 14 (0.85%) Distributed Architecture
14 14 (0.85%) IoT
14 14 (0.85%) Public Cloud
15 12 (0.73%) Clustering
Operating Systems
1 7 (0.42%) Windows
2 4 (0.24%) Linux
3 1 (0.060%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 792 (47.85%) Analytics
2 603 (36.44%) AI
3 593 (35.83%) Data Pipeline
4 517 (31.24%) Data Modelling
5 481 (29.06%) ETL
6 439 (26.53%) CI/CD
7 422 (25.50%) Business Intelligence
8 398 (24.05%) Data Governance
9 397 (23.99%) Decision-Making
10 392 (23.69%) Agile
11 374 (22.60%) Machine Learning
12 349 (21.09%) Data Architecture
13 316 (19.09%) DevOps
14 313 (18.91%) Mentoring
15 274 (16.56%) Problem-Solving
16 271 (16.37%) Data Science
17 228 (13.78%) Roadmaps
18 211 (12.75%) Technical Leadership
19 201 (12.15%) Lakehouse
20 188 (11.36%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 842 (50.88%) SQL
2 825 (49.85%) Python
3 125 (7.55%) Java
4 74 (4.47%) Scala
5 61 (3.69%) JavaScript
6 51 (3.08%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 35 (2.11%) C#
8 32 (1.93%) C++
8 32 (1.93%) TypeScript
9 29 (1.75%) R
10 19 (1.15%) Bash
11 16 (0.97%) T-SQL
12 13 (0.79%) PowerShell
13 10 (0.60%) Go
14 8 (0.48%) Bicep
15 7 (0.42%) Groovy
16 5 (0.30%) PL/SQL
16 5 (0.30%) VBA
17 4 (0.24%) Rust
18 2 (0.12%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 177 (10.69%) Security Cleared
2 169 (10.21%) Degree
3 120 (7.25%) SC Cleared
4 55 (3.32%) Master's Degree
5 50 (3.02%) Computer Science Degree
6 47 (2.84%) Azure Certification
7 40 (2.42%) DV Cleared
8 30 (1.81%) BPSS Clearance
9 27 (1.63%) AWS Certification
9 27 (1.63%) DBS Check
10 25 (1.51%) PhD
11 15 (0.91%) ACCA
11 15 (0.91%) CIMA
11 15 (0.91%) Microsoft Certification
12 6 (0.36%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 6 (0.36%) Numerate Degree
13 5 (0.30%) CBAP
14 4 (0.24%) CCA
15 3 (0.18%) CISSP
15 3 (0.18%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 472 (28.52%) Data Quality
2 70 (4.23%) GDPR
3 58 (3.50%) Accessibility
4 34 (2.05%) QA
5 11 (0.66%) GRC
6 10 (0.60%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 9 (0.54%) Actionable Recommendations
8 8 (0.48%) NCSC
9 5 (0.30%) PERC
10 4 (0.24%) PMO
10 4 (0.24%) SLA
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
12 2 (0.12%) Solvency II
13 1 (0.060%) NIST
System Software
1 97 (5.86%) Docker
2 41 (2.48%) Virtual Machines
3 7 (0.42%) Active Directory
4 3 (0.18%) NDS
4 3 (0.18%) VMware Infrastructure
5 1 (0.060%) Apache Flume
5 1 (0.060%) Embedded Firmware
5 1 (0.060%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 67 (4.05%) Kubernetes
2 13 (0.79%) Grafana
3 5 (0.30%) Prometheus
4 4 (0.24%) Argo
5 3 (0.18%) Ansible
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 (0.060%) CASB
Vendors
1 407 (24.59%) Databricks
2 313 (18.91%) Microsoft
3 92 (5.56%) Google
4 40 (2.42%) Oracle
5 34 (2.05%) Palantir
6 31 (1.87%) Foundry
7 29 (1.75%) SAP
8 27 (1.63%) Informatica
8 27 (1.63%) Salesforce
9 25 (1.51%) OpenAI
10 20 (1.21%) Dell
11 14 (0.85%) Cloudera
12 11 (0.66%) Sage
12 11 (0.66%) Teradata
13 9 (0.54%) Alteryx
14 8 (0.48%) Denodo
15 5 (0.30%) IBM
15 5 (0.30%) MicroStrategy
15 5 (0.30%) Talend
15 5 (0.30%) YouTube