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

6 months to
23 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 144 144 179
Rank change year-on-year 0 +35 -53
Permanent jobs citing Data Engineering 1,291 968 1,588
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.39% 2.27% 1.63%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.89% 2.43% 1.92%
Number of salaries quoted 888 494 914
10th Percentile £44,959 £46,250 £41,776
25th Percentile £57,500 £58,000 £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 £98,750 £109,604 £90,000
90th Percentile £115,000 £136,250 £105,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £70,000 £66,367 £63,500
% change year-on-year +5.47% +4.51% +5.40%

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 68,427 39,782 82,504
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.76% 93.32% 84.70%
Number of salaries quoted 44,356 20,831 59,666
10th Percentile £30,000 £30,000 £29,035
25th Percentile £40,797 £41,250 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £59,500 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +0.84% +8.18% -9.84%
75th Percentile £78,750 £78,750 £72,500
90th Percentile £100,000 £102,500 £92,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £52,500 £52,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year +0.96% +4.00% -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 23 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 23 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 +4 1,152 £80,000 - 520
London +49 597 £85,000 -12.82% 281
UK excluding London -31 580 £70,000 +5.47% 314
Work from Home -6 415 £82,500 -5.48% 236
North of England -58 208 £80,000 +20.75% 114
North West -46 109 £90,000 +28.57% 64
South East -68 105 £70,000 - 93
Midlands +18 100 £65,000 +8.33% 33
Yorkshire -13 76 £67,500 - 25
West Midlands +8 68 £63,750 +10.87% 26
East of England +20 61 £70,000 +40.00% 10
South West -33 55 £51,250 -46.05% 29
Scotland +17 40 £87,500 +94.44% 18
East Midlands -22 30 £65,000 - 7
North East -26 23 £66,250 +29.27% 27
Wales -30 11 £62,500 -21.88% 11

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
1 186 (14.41%) Apache Airflow
2 146 (11.31%) Apache Spark
3 88 (6.82%) Apache
4 36 (2.79%) Palantir Foundry
5 20 (1.55%) SAS
6 14 (1.08%) SharePoint
7 10 (0.77%) Appian
7 10 (0.77%) Confluence
8 9 (0.70%) Jupyter
9 6 (0.46%) Moodle
10 4 (0.31%) Microsoft Exchange
11 2 (0.15%) Luigi
12 1 (0.077%) ArcGIS
12 1 (0.077%) Camunda
12 1 (0.077%) GeoServer
12 1 (0.077%) WordPress
Applications
1 24 (1.86%) Microsoft Excel
2 10 (0.77%) Spreadsheet
3 2 (0.15%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.077%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 3 (0.23%) Markit EDM
1 3 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
1 3 (0.23%) SAP SD
2 2 (0.15%) Unit4 Business World
3 1 (0.077%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.077%) Infor M3
3 1 (0.077%) Oracle Assets
3 1 (0.077%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.077%) Primavera
Cloud Services
1 616 (47.71%) Azure
2 419 (32.46%) AWS
3 229 (17.74%) Snowflake
4 228 (17.66%) GCP
5 226 (17.51%) Power Platform
6 167 (12.94%) Azure Data Factory
7 148 (11.46%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 123 (9.53%) dbt
9 85 (6.58%) Azure Machine Learning
10 84 (6.51%) Amazon S3
11 76 (5.89%) Azure AI
12 69 (5.34%) Azure DevOps
13 66 (5.11%) Serverless
14 51 (3.95%) GitHub
15 33 (2.56%) SaaS
16 32 (2.48%) AWS Lambda
17 30 (2.32%) GitHub Actions
18 25 (1.94%) Microsoft Purview
18 25 (1.94%) Power Automate
18 25 (1.94%) Vertex AI
Communications & Networking
1 22 (1.70%) Broadband
2 4 (0.31%) HTTP
3 2 (0.15%) 4G
3 2 (0.15%) 5G
3 2 (0.15%) DAB
3 2 (0.15%) DHCP
3 2 (0.15%) DNS
3 2 (0.15%) Firewall
3 2 (0.15%) MQTT
4 1 (0.077%) Kerberos
4 1 (0.077%) Radio Access Network
Database & Business Intelligence
1 275 (21.30%) Data Warehouse
2 215 (16.65%) Power BI
3 203 (15.72%) Data Lake
4 148 (11.46%) SQL Server
5 112 (8.68%) BigQuery
6 106 (8.21%) Tableau
7 92 (7.13%) Metadata
8 88 (6.82%) Amazon Redshift
9 65 (5.03%) Relational Database
10 53 (4.11%) Delta Lake
11 50 (3.87%) Spark SQL
12 49 (3.80%) Semantic Layer
13 48 (3.72%) Big Data
13 48 (3.72%) Elasticsearch
13 48 (3.72%) NoSQL
14 47 (3.64%) Looker
15 43 (3.33%) Azure SQL Database
16 41 (3.18%) PostgreSQL
16 41 (3.18%) Snowflake Schema
16 41 (3.18%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 86 (6.66%) Git
2 58 (4.49%) MLflow
3 25 (1.94%) Jenkins
4 18 (1.39%) JIRA
5 16 (1.24%) GitLab
6 12 (0.93%) IBM UrbanCode
7 7 (0.54%) Selenium
8 4 (0.31%) Claude Code
9 3 (0.23%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
10 1 (0.077%) Bitbucket
10 1 (0.077%) CMake
10 1 (0.077%) Cucumber
10 1 (0.077%) Deequ
10 1 (0.077%) JMeter
10 1 (0.077%) RStudio
10 1 (0.077%) Visual Studio
10 1 (0.077%) Yeoman
10 1 (0.077%) Zephyr
General
1 316 (24.48%) Finance
2 247 (19.13%) Social Skills
3 200 (15.49%) Analytical Skills
4 83 (6.43%) Public Sector
5 76 (5.89%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 60 (4.65%) Banking
7 55 (4.26%) Retail
8 37 (2.87%) Influencing Skills
9 33 (2.56%) Legal
10 30 (2.32%) Marketing
11 28 (2.17%) Law
12 16 (1.24%) Manufacturing
13 15 (1.16%) Advertising
13 15 (1.16%) Financial Institution
14 12 (0.93%) Investment Banking
15 11 (0.85%) Games
16 10 (0.77%) Front Office
17 9 (0.70%) Automotive
17 9 (0.70%) Publishing
18 7 (0.54%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 515 (39.89%) Data Engineer
2 256 (19.83%) Senior
3 235 (18.20%) Lead
4 133 (10.30%) Senior Data Engineer
5 108 (8.37%) Data Manager
6 100 (7.75%) Lead Data Engineer
7 97 (7.51%) Architect
8 76 (5.89%) Data Architect
9 74 (5.73%) Consultant
10 69 (5.34%) Engineering Manager
11 54 (4.18%) Data Consultant
12 45 (3.49%) Analyst
13 43 (3.33%) Platform Engineer
13 43 (3.33%) Principal Engineer
14 41 (3.18%) Developer
15 38 (2.94%) Azure Engineer
16 35 (2.71%) AWS Engineer
17 33 (2.56%) Finance Manager
17 33 (2.56%) Technical Leader
18 30 (2.32%) Head of Engineering
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 145 (11.23%) PySpark
2 99 (7.67%) Kafka
3 61 (4.73%) PyTorch
3 61 (4.73%) TensorFlow
4 45 (3.49%) scikit-learn
5 44 (3.41%) REST
6 40 (3.10%) LangChain
7 29 (2.25%) Pandas
8 27 (2.09%) pgvector
9 25 (1.94%) LlamaIndex
10 19 (1.47%) .NET
10 19 (1.47%) Faiss
10 19 (1.47%) Node.js
11 18 (1.39%) RESTful
12 16 (1.24%) HTML
13 14 (1.08%) FastAPI
13 14 (1.08%) React
14 13 (1.01%) CSS
14 13 (1.01%) NumPy
15 12 (0.93%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 120 (9.30%) Cloud Native
2 52 (4.03%) Product Ownership
3 47 (3.64%) Data Structures
4 44 (3.41%) Distributed Systems
5 32 (2.48%) Low-Code
6 29 (2.25%) Legacy Systems
7 27 (2.09%) Public Cloud
8 24 (1.86%) Self-Motivation
9 23 (1.78%) Clustering
10 20 (1.55%) e-Learning
10 20 (1.55%) Management Information System
11 17 (1.32%) Onboarding
12 14 (1.08%) Analytical Mindset
12 14 (1.08%) Greenfield Project
13 13 (1.01%) Social Media
14 12 (0.93%) NHS
15 11 (0.85%) AI Agents
15 11 (0.85%) Reinsurance
16 10 (0.77%) Cyberattack
16 10 (0.77%) Hybrid Cloud
Operating Systems
1 7 (0.54%) Linux
2 5 (0.39%) Windows
3 2 (0.15%) Windows Server
4 1 (0.077%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 609 (47.17%) Analytics
2 529 (40.98%) Data Pipeline
3 462 (35.79%) AI
4 453 (35.09%) Data Modelling
5 418 (32.38%) ETL
6 382 (29.59%) Data Governance
7 338 (26.18%) CI/CD
8 335 (25.95%) Business Intelligence
9 326 (25.25%) Agile
10 310 (24.01%) Data Architecture
11 292 (22.62%) Machine Learning
12 235 (18.20%) Data Science
13 234 (18.13%) Decision-Making
13 234 (18.13%) DevOps
14 221 (17.12%) Mentoring
15 207 (16.03%) Problem-Solving
16 194 (15.03%) Roadmaps
17 142 (11.00%) Continuous Improvement
18 136 (10.53%) Data Integration
19 132 (10.22%) Use Case
Programming Languages
1 672 (52.05%) Python
2 660 (51.12%) SQL
3 109 (8.44%) Java
4 60 (4.65%) Scala
5 38 (2.94%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 36 (2.79%) Bash
7 33 (2.56%) JavaScript
8 31 (2.40%) R
9 25 (1.94%) Go
10 23 (1.78%) PowerShell
11 17 (1.32%) C#
12 15 (1.16%) T-SQL
13 11 (0.85%) C++
13 11 (0.85%) TypeScript
14 6 (0.46%) Julia
14 6 (0.46%) PHP
15 5 (0.39%) Bicep
16 4 (0.31%) Rust
16 4 (0.31%) VBA
17 3 (0.23%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 148 (11.46%) Degree
2 88 (6.82%) Security Cleared
3 56 (4.34%) Computer Science Degree
4 55 (4.26%) SC Cleared
5 40 (3.10%) Master's Degree
6 32 (2.48%) DBS Check
7 31 (2.40%) Azure Certification
8 23 (1.78%) DV Cleared
9 13 (1.01%) AWS Certification
9 13 (1.01%) Microsoft Certification
10 10 (0.77%) PhD
11 7 (0.54%) BPSS Clearance
12 5 (0.39%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 4 (0.31%) CCA
14 3 (0.23%) CISSP
15 2 (0.15%) ACCA
15 2 (0.15%) CIMA
15 2 (0.15%) CompTIA Security+
15 2 (0.15%) GIAC
15 2 (0.15%) SANS
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 382 (29.59%) Data Quality
2 93 (7.20%) GDPR
3 37 (2.87%) California Consumer Privacy Act
4 31 (2.40%) Accessibility
5 23 (1.78%) GRC
6 22 (1.70%) QA
7 17 (1.32%) HIPAA
8 14 (1.08%) SLA
9 9 (0.70%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 7 (0.54%) NIST
10 7 (0.54%) PERC
11 5 (0.39%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 4 (0.31%) Solvency II
13 1 (0.077%) GMP
13 1 (0.077%) NCSC
13 1 (0.077%) PMO
System Software
1 96 (7.44%) Docker
2 57 (4.42%) Virtual Machines
3 11 (0.85%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.077%) Apache Flume
Systems Management
1 104 (8.06%) Terraform
2 70 (5.42%) Kubernetes
3 13 (1.01%) Grafana
4 10 (0.77%) Prometheus
5 9 (0.70%) Single Sign-On
6 7 (0.54%) Argo
7 6 (0.46%) Control-M
8 5 (0.39%) Ansible
8 5 (0.39%) Microsoft Intune
8 5 (0.39%) SCCM
9 2 (0.15%) Active Directory Federation Services
9 2 (0.15%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
9 2 (0.15%) Computer Incident Response Team
9 2 (0.15%) Kibana
10 1 (0.077%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 427 (33.08%) Databricks
2 237 (18.36%) Microsoft
3 61 (4.73%) Google
4 56 (4.34%) Informatica
5 52 (4.03%) Dell
5 52 (4.03%) Palantir
6 46 (3.56%) Oracle
7 42 (3.25%) Foundry
8 38 (2.94%) OpenAI
9 30 (2.32%) Cloudera
10 25 (1.94%) Teradata
11 24 (1.86%) Denodo
12 23 (1.78%) Salesforce
12 23 (1.78%) Talend
13 13 (1.01%) SAP
14 12 (0.93%) Red Hat
15 11 (0.85%) Automation Anywhere
15 11 (0.85%) UiPath
16 8 (0.62%) MicroStrategy
17 7 (0.54%) Cognos