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

6 months to
18 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 129 151 157
Rank change year-on-year +22 +6 +57
Permanent jobs citing Data Engineering 1,656 1,060 1,321
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.44% 2.14% 1.69%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.97% 2.42% 2.08%
Number of salaries quoted 1,174 478 658
10th Percentile £46,217 £46,000 £44,441
25th Percentile £56,000 £55,000 £56,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £79,750 £70,000 £70,000
Median % change year-on-year +13.93% - -6.67%
75th Percentile £100,000 £95,000 £92,500
90th Percentile £115,000 £112,500 £105,750
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 84,196 43,853 63,499
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.06% 88.72% 81.26%
Number of salaries quoted 58,302 24,746 35,929
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 £96,750 £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 18 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 18 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 1,534 £80,000 +14.29% 2,031
UK excluding London -12 824 £70,000 +7.69% 904
London +30 731 £90,000 +5.88% 1,298
Work from Home +10 524 £80,000 +13.48% 856
North of England -9 373 £75,000 +11.11% 254
North West -21 175 £80,000 +36.75% 148
South East -34 157 £70,000 +7.69% 231
Midlands +7 113 £75,000 +11.11% 109
North East +14 99 £66,805 +40.64% 40
Yorkshire -11 99 £75,000 +7.14% 66
South West -29 86 £62,500 +4.17% 92
West Midlands -8 78 £75,000 +25.00% 81
East of England -19 40 £70,000 +40.00% 52
East Midlands -27 35 £75,000 +10.29% 28
Scotland -12 30 £100,000 +37.93% 86
Wales -42 28 £63,500 +26.69% 19
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 61

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
1 169 (10.21%) Apache Spark
2 139 (8.39%) Apache Airflow
3 127 (7.67%) Apache
4 22 (1.33%) Palantir Foundry
5 21 (1.27%) Jupyter
6 14 (0.85%) SAS
7 11 (0.66%) 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 5 (0.30%) 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
1 689 (41.61%) Azure
2 482 (29.11%) AWS
3 286 (17.27%) Power Platform
4 274 (16.55%) GCP
5 205 (12.38%) Snowflake
6 181 (10.93%) Azure Data Factory
7 148 (8.94%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 134 (8.09%) dbt
9 100 (6.04%) Azure DevOps
10 99 (5.98%) Amazon S3
10 99 (5.98%) Serverless
11 82 (4.95%) Azure Machine Learning
12 67 (4.05%) Azure AI
13 66 (3.99%) AWS Lambda
14 64 (3.86%) GitHub
15 63 (3.80%) SaaS
16 51 (3.08%) Amazon EMR
17 48 (2.90%) Azure Databricks
18 45 (2.72%) Microsoft Purview
19 41 (2.48%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 18 (1.09%) 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
1 292 (17.63%) Data Warehouse
2 276 (16.67%) Power BI
3 218 (13.16%) Data Lake
4 132 (7.97%) SQL Server
5 114 (6.88%) BigQuery
6 107 (6.46%) Amazon Redshift
7 104 (6.28%) Metadata
7 104 (6.28%) Tableau
8 85 (5.13%) Big Data
9 70 (4.23%) Azure SQL Database
10 64 (3.86%) NoSQL
11 59 (3.56%) Semantic Layer
12 57 (3.44%) Relational Database
12 57 (3.44%) Star Schema
13 56 (3.38%) Delta Lake
14 51 (3.08%) PostgreSQL
15 50 (3.02%) Amazon Athena
16 47 (2.84%) Spark SQL
17 39 (2.36%) Looker
18 35 (2.11%) Data Vault
Development Applications
1 124 (7.49%) Git
2 35 (2.11%) Jenkins
3 25 (1.51%) GitLab
4 23 (1.39%) JIRA
5 15 (0.91%) MLflow
6 10 (0.60%) Claude Code
7 5 (0.30%) Poetry
8 4 (0.24%) Visual Studio Code
9 3 (0.18%) Bitbucket
9 3 (0.18%) Octopus Deploy
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
1 433 (26.15%) Finance
2 415 (25.06%) Social Skills
3 283 (17.09%) Analytical Skills
4 144 (8.70%) Public Sector
5 110 (6.64%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 72 (4.35%) Banking
7 60 (3.62%) Retail
8 55 (3.32%) Marketing
9 46 (2.78%) Legal
10 38 (2.29%) Influencing Skills
11 37 (2.23%) Law
12 31 (1.87%) Financial Institution
13 26 (1.57%) Manufacturing
14 22 (1.33%) Advertising
15 13 (0.79%) Games
15 13 (0.79%) Organisational Skills
15 13 (0.79%) Presentation Skills
16 12 (0.72%) Aerospace
17 10 (0.60%) Documentation Skills
17 10 (0.60%) Police
Job Titles
1 649 (39.19%) Data Engineer
2 363 (21.92%) Senior
3 297 (17.93%) Lead
4 188 (11.35%) Senior Data Engineer
5 142 (8.57%) Architect
6 116 (7.00%) Data Manager
7 100 (6.04%) Data Architect
8 96 (5.80%) Lead Data Engineer
9 76 (4.59%) Analyst
10 73 (4.41%) Engineering Manager
10 73 (4.41%) Principal Engineer
11 71 (4.29%) Developer
12 61 (3.68%) Consultant
13 58 (3.50%) Software Engineer
14 55 (3.32%) Databricks Engineer
15 46 (2.78%) Head of Engineering
16 45 (2.72%) Principal Data Engineer
17 44 (2.66%) Data Scientist
17 44 (2.66%) Databricks Data Engineer
18 42 (2.54%) Data Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 180 (10.87%) PySpark
2 128 (7.73%) Terraform
3 85 (5.13%) Kafka
4 41 (2.48%) .NET
5 39 (2.36%) LangChain
6 36 (2.17%) 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 (0.72%) React
16 11 (0.66%) FastAPI
16 11 (0.66%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 183 (11.05%) Cloud Native
2 67 (4.05%) Data Structures
3 63 (3.80%) Product Ownership
4 55 (3.32%) Distributed Systems
5 48 (2.90%) Onboarding
6 36 (2.17%) AI Agents
7 25 (1.51%) e-Learning
8 20 (1.21%) Analytical Mindset
8 20 (1.21%) Self-Motivation
9 19 (1.15%) Distributed Computing
10 18 (1.09%) Legacy Systems
10 18 (1.09%) Management Information System
11 16 (0.97%) Greenfield Project
11 16 (0.97%) Hedge funds
11 16 (0.97%) Low-Code
12 15 (0.91%) Hybrid Cloud
13 14 (0.85%) Distributed Architecture
13 14 (0.85%) IoT
13 14 (0.85%) Public Cloud
14 12 (0.72%) Clustering
Operating Systems
1 7 (0.42%) Windows
2 4 (0.24%) Linux
3 1 (0.060%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 781 (47.16%) Analytics
2 614 (37.08%) AI
3 583 (35.21%) Data Pipeline
4 512 (30.92%) Data Modelling
5 475 (28.68%) ETL
6 435 (26.27%) CI/CD
7 421 (25.42%) Business Intelligence
8 411 (24.82%) Data Governance
9 403 (24.34%) Agile
10 396 (23.91%) Decision-Making
11 389 (23.49%) Machine Learning
12 360 (21.74%) Data Architecture
13 313 (18.90%) DevOps
13 313 (18.90%) Mentoring
14 270 (16.30%) Problem-Solving
15 269 (16.24%) Data Science
16 244 (14.73%) Roadmaps
17 208 (12.56%) Technical Leadership
18 200 (12.08%) Lakehouse
19 188 (11.35%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 848 (51.21%) SQL
2 817 (49.34%) Python
3 124 (7.49%) Java
4 73 (4.41%) Scala
5 60 (3.62%) JavaScript
6 52 (3.14%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 35 (2.11%) C#
8 31 (1.87%) C++
9 30 (1.81%) TypeScript
10 28 (1.69%) R
11 19 (1.15%) Bash
12 16 (0.97%) T-SQL
13 13 (0.79%) PowerShell
14 11 (0.66%) Go
15 8 (0.48%) Bicep
16 7 (0.42%) Groovy
17 5 (0.30%) PL/SQL
17 5 (0.30%) VBA
18 4 (0.24%) Rust
19 3 (0.18%) Julia
Qualifications
1 174 (10.51%) Security Cleared
2 167 (10.08%) Degree
3 118 (7.13%) SC Cleared
4 55 (3.32%) Master's Degree
5 50 (3.02%) Computer Science Degree
6 46 (2.78%) Azure Certification
7 40 (2.42%) DV Cleared
8 29 (1.75%) BPSS Clearance
8 29 (1.75%) DBS Check
9 27 (1.63%) AWS Certification
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
1 469 (28.32%) Data Quality
2 71 (4.29%) 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 6 (0.36%) 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 56 (3.38%) 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 65 (3.93%) 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
1 416 (25.12%) Databricks
2 323 (19.50%) Microsoft
3 92 (5.56%) Google
4 39 (2.36%) Oracle
5 33 (1.99%) Palantir
6 30 (1.81%) Foundry
7 29 (1.75%) SAP
8 27 (1.63%) Informatica
9 26 (1.57%) Salesforce
10 25 (1.51%) OpenAI
11 20 (1.21%) Dell
12 14 (0.85%) Cloudera
13 11 (0.66%) Sage
13 11 (0.66%) Teradata
14 9 (0.54%) Alteryx
15 8 (0.48%) Denodo
16 5 (0.30%) IBM
16 5 (0.30%) MicroStrategy
16 5 (0.30%) YouTube
17 4 (0.24%) Cognos