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

6 months to
20 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 128 155 146
Rank change year-on-year +27 -9 +46
Permanent jobs citing Data Engineering 1,597 1,058 1,459
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.49% 2.12% 1.76%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.03% 2.38% 2.17%
Number of salaries quoted 1,122 454 730
10th Percentile £45,046 £46,075 £42,500
25th Percentile £56,063 £55,237 £55,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £80,000 £70,500 £70,000
Median % change year-on-year +13.48% +0.71% -6.67%
75th Percentile £100,000 £95,000 £90,000
90th Percentile £115,000 £112,500 £105,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £75,000 £67,500 £62,500
% change year-on-year +11.11% +8.00% -

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 78,808 44,479 67,117
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.30% 89.14% 80.83%
Number of salaries quoted 54,325 25,171 42,850
10th Percentile £31,000 £28,500 £31,250
25th Percentile £41,250 £36,750 £41,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% - -8.71%
75th Percentile £78,750 £75,000 £75,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £97,250 £95,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £47,500 £50,000
% change year-on-year +15.79% -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 20 August 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 August 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 +31 1,502 £80,000 +13.48% 583
UK excluding London -22 771 £75,000 +11.11% 363
London +45 734 £87,500 - 332
Work from Home +19 477 £82,000 +9.33% 269
North of England +3 340 £78,500 +16.30% 108
North West -21 169 £80,000 +33.33% 57
South East -50 156 £67,500 +3.85% 116
Midlands +22 101 £72,500 +7.41% 30
Yorkshire +1 98 £80,000 +14.29% 27
South West -30 77 £60,000 -14.29% 51
North East +2 73 £67,500 +42.11% 25
West Midlands +4 68 £75,000 +25.00% 25
East of England +6 59 £70,000 +40.00% 21
East Midlands -11 33 £52,500 -22.79% 5
Scotland -24 21 £100,000 +90.48% 25
Wales -49 18 £61,750 -10.51% 5
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 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
1 187 (11.71%) Apache Spark
2 169 (10.58%) Apache Airflow
3 131 (8.20%) Apache
4 24 (1.50%) Palantir Foundry
5 20 (1.25%) Jupyter
6 19 (1.19%) SAS
7 11 (0.69%) SharePoint
8 9 (0.56%) Confluence
9 4 (0.25%) Luigi
9 4 (0.25%) Moodle
10 2 (0.13%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.13%) Tornado
11 1 (0.063%) Adobe Experience Manager
11 1 (0.063%) ArcGIS
11 1 (0.063%) GeoServer
Applications
1 19 (1.19%) Microsoft Excel
2 10 (0.63%) Spreadsheet
3 2 (0.13%) Microsoft Office
3 2 (0.13%) MS Visio
4 1 (0.063%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 3 (0.19%) SAP SD
2 2 (0.13%) Dynamics CRM
2 2 (0.13%) IBM Planning Analytics
2 2 (0.13%) SAP Business One
2 2 (0.13%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.063%) FastStats
3 1 (0.063%) Infor M3
3 1 (0.063%) Markit EDM
3 1 (0.063%) NetSuite
3 1 (0.063%) Oracle Assets
3 1 (0.063%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.063%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 676 (42.33%) Azure
2 489 (30.62%) AWS
3 283 (17.72%) Power Platform
4 273 (17.09%) GCP
5 242 (15.15%) Snowflake
6 164 (10.27%) Azure Data Factory
7 154 (9.64%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 146 (9.14%) dbt
9 94 (5.89%) Amazon S3
10 86 (5.39%) Azure DevOps
11 85 (5.32%) Azure Machine Learning
11 85 (5.32%) Serverless
12 69 (4.32%) Azure AI
13 58 (3.63%) GitHub
13 58 (3.63%) SaaS
14 45 (2.82%) Microsoft Purview
15 41 (2.57%) AWS Lambda
16 33 (2.07%) Amazon EMR
17 24 (1.50%) AWS CloudFormation
17 24 (1.50%) GitHub Actions
Communications & Networking
1 24 (1.50%) Broadband
2 7 (0.44%) Internet
3 4 (0.25%) 5G
4 2 (0.13%) DAB
4 2 (0.13%) Firewall
4 2 (0.13%) HTTP
4 2 (0.13%) MQTT
5 1 (0.063%) 4G
5 1 (0.063%) ATM
5 1 (0.063%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 301 (18.85%) Data Warehouse
2 271 (16.97%) Power BI
3 228 (14.28%) Data Lake
4 141 (8.83%) SQL Server
5 127 (7.95%) Tableau
6 122 (7.64%) BigQuery
7 110 (6.89%) Amazon Redshift
8 92 (5.76%) Metadata
9 85 (5.32%) Big Data
10 64 (4.01%) Relational Database
11 62 (3.88%) NoSQL
12 61 (3.82%) Azure SQL Database
13 59 (3.69%) PostgreSQL
14 56 (3.51%) Semantic Layer
15 55 (3.44%) Star Schema
16 53 (3.32%) Delta Lake
16 53 (3.32%) Looker
17 49 (3.07%) Elasticsearch
18 46 (2.88%) Snowflake Schema
18 46 (2.88%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 109 (6.83%) Git
2 33 (2.07%) Jenkins
3 30 (1.88%) MLflow
4 23 (1.44%) GitLab
5 20 (1.25%) JIRA
6 12 (0.75%) IBM UrbanCode
7 9 (0.56%) Claude Code
8 4 (0.25%) Bitbucket
8 4 (0.25%) Selenium
9 3 (0.19%) Visual Studio Code
10 2 (0.13%) ERwin
10 2 (0.13%) VSS/SourceSafe
11 1 (0.063%) Poetry
11 1 (0.063%) RStudio
11 1 (0.063%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
11 1 (0.063%) Visual Studio
11 1 (0.063%) Yeoman
General
1 417 (26.11%) Finance
2 372 (23.29%) Social Skills
3 270 (16.91%) Analytical Skills
4 110 (6.89%) Public Sector
5 103 (6.45%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 76 (4.76%) Banking
7 57 (3.57%) Retail
8 51 (3.19%) Marketing
9 48 (3.01%) Legal
10 41 (2.57%) Influencing Skills
11 31 (1.94%) Law
12 28 (1.75%) Financial Institution
13 25 (1.57%) Advertising
13 25 (1.57%) Manufacturing
14 18 (1.13%) Games
15 12 (0.75%) Aerospace
15 12 (0.75%) Investment Banking
16 11 (0.69%) Presentation Skills
17 9 (0.56%) Front Office
18 7 (0.44%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 588 (36.82%) Data Engineer
2 342 (21.42%) Senior
3 288 (18.03%) Lead
4 157 (9.83%) Senior Data Engineer
5 143 (8.95%) Architect
6 111 (6.95%) Data Manager
7 101 (6.32%) Data Architect
8 95 (5.95%) Lead Data Engineer
9 79 (4.95%) Analyst
10 70 (4.38%) Consultant
10 70 (4.38%) Engineering Manager
11 69 (4.32%) Principal Engineer
12 56 (3.51%) Developer
13 49 (3.07%) Data Consultant
14 48 (3.01%) Head of Engineering
15 42 (2.63%) Python Engineer
15 42 (2.63%) Software Engineer
16 41 (2.57%) Data Scientist
16 41 (2.57%) Principal Data Engineer
17 35 (2.19%) Platform Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 155 (9.71%) PySpark
2 124 (7.76%) Terraform
3 98 (6.14%) Kafka
4 45 (2.82%) LangChain
5 43 (2.69%) scikit-learn
6 42 (2.63%) PyTorch
6 42 (2.63%) TensorFlow
7 38 (2.38%) LlamaIndex
8 35 (2.19%) REST
9 29 (1.82%) pgvector
10 27 (1.69%) Node.js
11 25 (1.57%) Pandas
12 21 (1.31%) .NET
13 19 (1.19%) SpaCy
14 17 (1.06%) Apache NiFi
14 17 (1.06%) JSON
15 15 (0.94%) RESTful
16 11 (0.69%) ARM Templates
16 11 (0.69%) FastAPI
16 11 (0.69%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 183 (11.46%) Cloud Native
2 66 (4.13%) Data Structures
3 64 (4.01%) Product Ownership
4 56 (3.51%) Distributed Systems
5 34 (2.13%) Onboarding
6 28 (1.75%) AI Agents
6 28 (1.75%) e-Learning
7 26 (1.63%) Public Cloud
8 25 (1.57%) Clustering
9 23 (1.44%) Low-Code
10 21 (1.31%) Analytical Mindset
10 21 (1.31%) Distributed Computing
11 20 (1.25%) Management Information System
12 18 (1.13%) Greenfield Project
12 18 (1.13%) Legacy Systems
12 18 (1.13%) Self-Motivation
13 15 (0.94%) Distributed Architecture
14 13 (0.81%) IoT
15 12 (0.75%) Algorithms
15 12 (0.75%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 7 (0.44%) Windows
2 6 (0.38%) Linux
3 1 (0.063%) Apple iOS
3 1 (0.063%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 768 (48.09%) Analytics
2 629 (39.39%) AI
3 567 (35.50%) Data Pipeline
4 503 (31.50%) Data Modelling
5 437 (27.36%) ETL
6 435 (27.24%) Data Governance
7 406 (25.42%) Business Intelligence
8 394 (24.67%) Machine Learning
9 391 (24.48%) CI/CD
10 378 (23.67%) Agile
11 362 (22.67%) Data Architecture
12 360 (22.54%) Decision-Making
13 293 (18.35%) DevOps
14 282 (17.66%) Mentoring
15 270 (16.91%) Data Science
16 242 (15.15%) Problem-Solving
17 238 (14.90%) Roadmaps
18 191 (11.96%) Continuous Improvement
19 167 (10.46%) Technical Leadership
20 156 (9.77%) Data Strategy
Programming Languages
1 804 (50.34%) Python
2 798 (49.97%) SQL
3 110 (6.89%) Java
4 65 (4.07%) Scala
5 45 (2.82%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 41 (2.57%) JavaScript
7 27 (1.69%) R
8 22 (1.38%) TypeScript
9 19 (1.19%) Bash
10 17 (1.06%) C#
10 17 (1.06%) Go
11 15 (0.94%) PowerShell
12 14 (0.88%) T-SQL
13 11 (0.69%) C++
14 8 (0.50%) Bicep
14 8 (0.50%) Groovy
15 7 (0.44%) VBA
16 6 (0.38%) Julia
17 5 (0.31%) PL/SQL
18 4 (0.25%) Rust
Qualifications
1 182 (11.40%) Degree
2 145 (9.08%) Security Cleared
3 91 (5.70%) SC Cleared
4 57 (3.57%) Computer Science Degree
5 55 (3.44%) Master's Degree
6 40 (2.50%) Azure Certification
6 40 (2.50%) DV Cleared
7 32 (2.00%) DBS Check
8 26 (1.63%) BPSS Clearance
9 23 (1.44%) AWS Certification
10 20 (1.25%) PhD
11 12 (0.75%) ACCA
11 12 (0.75%) CIMA
12 11 (0.69%) Microsoft Certification
13 7 (0.44%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 6 (0.38%) Numerate Degree
15 4 (0.25%) CCA
16 3 (0.19%) CBAP
16 3 (0.19%) CISSP
16 3 (0.19%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 441 (27.61%) Data Quality
2 101 (6.32%) GDPR
3 53 (3.32%) Accessibility
4 41 (2.57%) QA
5 35 (2.19%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 15 (0.94%) GRC
7 12 (0.75%) HIPAA
8 9 (0.56%) Actionable Recommendations
9 7 (0.44%) PERC
10 6 (0.38%) SLA
11 4 (0.25%) NCSC
11 4 (0.25%) PMO
11 4 (0.25%) Solvency II
12 3 (0.19%) EU AI Act
12 3 (0.19%) PCI DSS
12 3 (0.19%) PSD2
13 2 (0.13%) ISO/IEC 42001
14 1 (0.063%) ISO/IEC 27001
14 1 (0.063%) NIST
System Software
1 93 (5.82%) Docker
2 56 (3.51%) Virtual Machines
3 7 (0.44%) Active Directory
4 3 (0.19%) VMware Infrastructure
5 2 (0.13%) NDS
6 1 (0.063%) Apache Flume
6 1 (0.063%) Embedded Firmware
6 1 (0.063%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 61 (3.82%) Kubernetes
2 15 (0.94%) Grafana
3 6 (0.38%) Ansible
3 6 (0.38%) Prometheus
4 4 (0.25%) Argo
5 3 (0.19%) Kibana
5 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Intune
5 3 (0.19%) SCCM
6 2 (0.13%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
6 2 (0.13%) Computer Incident Response Team
7 1 (0.063%) CASB
7 1 (0.063%) Control-M
Vendors
1 465 (29.12%) Databricks
2 293 (18.35%) Microsoft
3 88 (5.51%) Google
4 50 (3.13%) Dell
5 49 (3.07%) Oracle
6 46 (2.88%) Informatica
7 37 (2.32%) Palantir
8 33 (2.07%) Foundry
9 32 (2.00%) SAP
10 27 (1.69%) Cloudera
10 27 (1.69%) OpenAI
11 26 (1.63%) Teradata
12 24 (1.50%) Denodo
12 24 (1.50%) Salesforce
13 12 (0.75%) Red Hat
14 10 (0.63%) Sage
15 9 (0.56%) Alteryx
16 6 (0.38%) MicroStrategy
17 5 (0.31%) Cognos
17 5 (0.31%) Talend