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

6 months to
1 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 140 166 177
Rank change year-on-year +26 +11 -60
Permanent jobs citing Data Engineering 1,270 825 1,580
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.41% 1.95% 1.65%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.89% 2.10% 1.93%
Number of salaries quoted 847 560 900
10th Percentile £46,250 £45,000 £41,492
25th Percentile £58,199 £53,750 £55,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £75,000 £80,000 £70,000
Median % change year-on-year -6.25% +14.29% -6.67%
75th Percentile £97,500 £115,000 £88,063
90th Percentile £118,750 £130,500 £105,246
UK excluding London median annual salary £70,000 £65,000 £65,000
% change year-on-year +7.69% - +6.24%

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 67,199 39,303 82,062
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 74.71% 92.91% 85.63%
Number of salaries quoted 41,762 22,588 59,681
10th Percentile £30,000 £30,750 £29,000
25th Percentile £40,000 £42,500 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £57,946 £60,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year -3.42% +9.09% -10.57%
75th Percentile £78,500 £80,000 £72,500
90th Percentile £100,000 £102,500 £92,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £52,500 £50,000
% change year-on-year -4.76% +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 1 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 1 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 +23 1,135 £75,000 -6.25% 434
London +47 584 £85,000 -12.82% 210
UK excluding London 0 572 £70,000 +7.69% 280
Work from Home +25 449 £80,000 -5.88% 213
North of England -2 182 £80,000 +28.00% 91
South East -57 124 £71,250 +1.79% 73
Midlands +10 108 £65,000 +13.04% 50
North West +22 95 £90,000 +33.33% 46
West Midlands +12 78 £62,500 +25.00% 35
Yorkshire -44 71 £68,750 +10.00% 24
East of England +11 61 £63,750 +27.50% 8
South West -41 47 £51,250 -47.93% 34
Scotland -12 43 £83,750 +45.65% 17
East Midlands -36 28 £75,000 +15.38% 15
North East -30 16 £70,000 +33.33% 21
Wales -28 7 £65,000 -18.75% 8

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 (14.57%) Apache Airflow
2 133 (10.47%) Apache Spark
3 77 (6.06%) Apache
4 33 (2.60%) Palantir Foundry
5 22 (1.73%) SAS
6 16 (1.26%) SharePoint
7 12 (0.94%) Appian
8 9 (0.71%) Confluence
9 7 (0.55%) Moodle
10 4 (0.31%) Microsoft Exchange
11 2 (0.16%) Jupyter
12 1 (0.079%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.079%) Camunda
12 1 (0.079%) GeoServer
12 1 (0.079%) WordPress
Applications
1 22 (1.73%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.63%) Spreadsheet
3 2 (0.16%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.079%) Notion
Business Applications
1 3 (0.24%) Markit EDM
1 3 (0.24%) SAP SD
2 2 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
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%) Primavera
3 1 (0.079%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 634 (49.92%) Azure
2 401 (31.57%) AWS
3 254 (20.00%) Snowflake
4 223 (17.56%) Power Platform
5 221 (17.40%) GCP
6 169 (13.31%) Azure Data Factory
7 155 (12.20%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 120 (9.45%) dbt
9 84 (6.61%) Azure Machine Learning
10 78 (6.14%) Azure AI
11 75 (5.91%) Amazon S3
12 65 (5.12%) Azure DevOps
13 64 (5.04%) Serverless
14 54 (4.25%) GitHub
15 37 (2.91%) SaaS
16 32 (2.52%) AWS Lambda
17 29 (2.28%) GitHub Actions
18 28 (2.20%) Power Automate
19 26 (2.05%) Amazon Kinesis
20 25 (1.97%) Dagster
Communications & Networking
1 19 (1.50%) Broadband
2 4 (0.31%) 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
1 297 (23.39%) Data Warehouse
2 212 (16.69%) Power BI
3 207 (16.30%) Data Lake
4 151 (11.89%) SQL Server
5 107 (8.43%) Tableau
6 100 (7.87%) BigQuery
7 87 (6.85%) Metadata
8 85 (6.69%) Amazon Redshift
9 59 (4.65%) Relational Database
10 51 (4.02%) Delta Lake
11 47 (3.70%) PostgreSQL
12 46 (3.62%) Looker
13 45 (3.54%) Elasticsearch
14 44 (3.46%) NoSQL
14 44 (3.46%) Spark SQL
15 42 (3.31%) Big Data
16 41 (3.23%) Azure SQL Database
16 41 (3.23%) Snowflake Schema
17 40 (3.15%) Semantic Layer
18 37 (2.91%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 88 (6.93%) Git
2 63 (4.96%) MLflow
3 20 (1.57%) Jenkins
4 18 (1.42%) JIRA
5 12 (0.94%) GitLab
5 12 (0.94%) IBM UrbanCode
6 7 (0.55%) Selenium
7 3 (0.24%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
8 2 (0.16%) 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%) Yeoman
9 1 (0.079%) Zephyr
General
1 316 (24.88%) Finance
2 236 (18.58%) Social Skills
3 191 (15.04%) Analytical Skills
4 74 (5.83%) Public Sector
5 69 (5.43%) Banking
6 66 (5.20%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 52 (4.09%) Retail
8 37 (2.91%) Law
9 35 (2.76%) Influencing Skills
10 34 (2.68%) Marketing
11 33 (2.60%) Legal
12 16 (1.26%) Advertising
12 16 (1.26%) Manufacturing
13 15 (1.18%) Investment Banking
14 12 (0.94%) Financial Institution
15 11 (0.87%) Automotive
15 11 (0.87%) Front Office
15 11 (0.87%) Games
16 8 (0.63%) Documentation Skills
17 7 (0.55%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 508 (40.00%) Data Engineer
2 232 (18.27%) Senior
3 224 (17.64%) Lead
4 120 (9.45%) Senior Data Engineer
5 117 (9.21%) Architect
6 102 (8.03%) Lead Data Engineer
7 101 (7.95%) Data Manager
8 99 (7.80%) Data Architect
9 68 (5.35%) Engineering Manager
10 62 (4.88%) Consultant
11 43 (3.39%) Data Consultant
12 41 (3.23%) Developer
12 41 (3.23%) Platform Engineer
13 39 (3.07%) Azure Engineer
14 38 (2.99%) Analyst
15 36 (2.83%) AWS Engineer
15 36 (2.83%) Principal Engineer
16 33 (2.60%) Finance Manager
17 31 (2.44%) Technical Leader
18 30 (2.36%) AWS Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 137 (10.79%) PySpark
2 105 (8.27%) Kafka
3 68 (5.35%) PyTorch
3 68 (5.35%) TensorFlow
4 49 (3.86%) scikit-learn
5 44 (3.46%) LangChain
6 39 (3.07%) REST
7 36 (2.83%) Pandas
8 27 (2.13%) pgvector
9 25 (1.97%) LlamaIndex
10 23 (1.81%) RESTful
11 21 (1.65%) Faiss
11 21 (1.65%) HTML
12 17 (1.34%) Node.js
13 16 (1.26%) .NET
13 16 (1.26%) CSS
13 16 (1.26%) FastAPI
13 16 (1.26%) pytest
13 16 (1.26%) React
14 15 (1.18%) Hugging Face
Miscellaneous
1 115 (9.06%) Cloud Native
2 51 (4.02%) Product Ownership
3 42 (3.31%) Distributed Systems
4 37 (2.91%) Data Structures
5 35 (2.76%) Legacy Systems
6 33 (2.60%) Low-Code
7 27 (2.13%) Public Cloud
8 23 (1.81%) Clustering
9 22 (1.73%) Self-Motivation
10 21 (1.65%) e-Learning
11 19 (1.50%) Management Information System
12 16 (1.26%) Greenfield Project
13 15 (1.18%) AI Agents
13 15 (1.18%) Analytical Mindset
13 15 (1.18%) Onboarding
14 13 (1.02%) NHS
14 13 (1.02%) Social Media
15 11 (0.87%) Algorithms
15 11 (0.87%) Hybrid Cloud
16 9 (0.71%) Reinsurance
Operating Systems
1 6 (0.47%) Linux
2 4 (0.31%) Windows
3 2 (0.16%) Windows Server
4 1 (0.079%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 623 (49.06%) Analytics
2 526 (41.42%) Data Pipeline
3 455 (35.83%) Data Modelling
4 450 (35.43%) AI
5 422 (33.23%) ETL
6 369 (29.06%) Data Governance
7 330 (25.98%) Business Intelligence
8 324 (25.51%) CI/CD
9 317 (24.96%) Agile
10 311 (24.49%) Data Architecture
11 292 (22.99%) Machine Learning
12 239 (18.82%) Data Science
13 227 (17.87%) DevOps
14 223 (17.56%) Decision-Making
15 210 (16.54%) Problem-Solving
16 201 (15.83%) Mentoring
17 181 (14.25%) Roadmaps
18 164 (12.91%) Data Integration
19 139 (10.94%) Continuous Improvement
20 131 (10.31%) Data Management
Programming Languages
1 647 (50.94%) Python
2 640 (50.39%) SQL
3 111 (8.74%) Java
4 54 (4.25%) Scala
5 36 (2.83%) Bash
6 35 (2.76%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 33 (2.60%) JavaScript
8 28 (2.20%) R
9 24 (1.89%) Go
10 23 (1.81%) PowerShell
11 18 (1.42%) C#
12 17 (1.34%) T-SQL
13 12 (0.94%) C++
13 12 (0.94%) TypeScript
14 8 (0.63%) PHP
15 7 (0.55%) Bicep
16 6 (0.47%) Julia
17 4 (0.31%) VBA
18 3 (0.24%) Groovy
18 3 (0.24%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 144 (11.34%) Degree
2 84 (6.61%) Security Cleared
3 58 (4.57%) Computer Science Degree
4 51 (4.02%) SC Cleared
5 40 (3.15%) Master's Degree
6 32 (2.52%) DBS Check
7 29 (2.28%) Azure Certification
8 20 (1.57%) DV Cleared
9 15 (1.18%) Microsoft Certification
10 14 (1.10%) AWS Certification
11 7 (0.55%) BPSS Clearance
12 6 (0.47%) PhD
13 5 (0.39%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 5 (0.39%) CISSP
14 2 (0.16%) CompTIA Security+
14 2 (0.16%) GIAC
14 2 (0.16%) OCP
14 2 (0.16%) PMI Certification
14 2 (0.16%) SANS
14 2 (0.16%) SnowPro
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 351 (27.64%) Data Quality
2 99 (7.80%) GDPR
3 49 (3.86%) Accessibility
4 37 (2.91%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 22 (1.73%) GRC
5 22 (1.73%) QA
6 18 (1.42%) HIPAA
7 14 (1.10%) SLA
8 10 (0.79%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 7 (0.55%) NIST
9 7 (0.55%) PERC
10 5 (0.39%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 4 (0.31%) Solvency II
12 1 (0.079%) Actionable Recommendations
12 1 (0.079%) GMP
12 1 (0.079%) NCSC
12 1 (0.079%) PMO
System Software
1 98 (7.72%) Docker
2 56 (4.41%) Virtual Machines
3 10 (0.79%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.079%) Apache Flume
Systems Management
1 95 (7.48%) Terraform
2 79 (6.22%) Kubernetes
3 15 (1.18%) Grafana
4 12 (0.94%) Prometheus
5 11 (0.87%) Argo
6 9 (0.71%) Single Sign-On
7 7 (0.55%) Ansible
8 6 (0.47%) Control-M
9 4 (0.31%) Microsoft Intune
9 4 (0.31%) SCCM
10 2 (0.16%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 2 (0.16%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
10 2 (0.16%) Computer Incident Response Team
11 1 (0.079%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 411 (32.36%) Databricks
2 251 (19.76%) Microsoft
3 64 (5.04%) Informatica
4 53 (4.17%) Google
5 52 (4.09%) Dell
6 51 (4.02%) Oracle
6 51 (4.02%) Palantir
7 40 (3.15%) OpenAI
8 39 (3.07%) Foundry
9 33 (2.60%) Cloudera
10 29 (2.28%) Talend
11 25 (1.97%) Denodo
11 25 (1.97%) Teradata
12 18 (1.42%) Salesforce
13 15 (1.18%) Red Hat
14 13 (1.02%) Automation Anywhere
14 13 (1.02%) UiPath
15 7 (0.55%) MuleSoft
15 7 (0.55%) SAP
16 5 (0.39%) Netezza