Linux Engineer Job Trends

Linux Engineer
UK

The median Linux Engineer salary in the UK is £55,000 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 4 January 2026.

The table below compares current salary benchmarking and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 459 541 481
Rank change year-on-year +82 -60 +110
Permanent jobs requiring a Linux Engineer 190 172 245
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.32% 0.32% 0.46%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.36% 0.34% 0.49%
Number of salaries quoted 137 117 209
10th Percentile £41,250 £36,250 £41,450
25th Percentile £45,000 £52,500 £46,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £61,000 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year -9.84% +1.67% -
75th Percentile £76,250 £76,250 £80,000
90th Percentile £92,500 £85,000 £98,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £55,000 £51,500
% change year-on-year -9.09% +6.80% -10.43%

All Permanent IT Job Roles
UK

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent IT job vacancies. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of permanent jobs in our overall sample.

Permanent vacancies in the UK with a recognized job title 53,448 50,590 50,228
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 90.53% 92.97% 95.23%
Number of salaries quoted 32,896 26,513 38,772
10th Percentile £28,500 £33,125 £31,250
25th Percentile £36,250 £44,738 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £60,000 £59,000
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +1.69% -1.67%
75th Percentile £75,000 £78,000 £77,500
90th Percentile £93,750 £97,500 £97,261
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £52,500 £50,000
% change year-on-year -4.76% +5.00% -4.76%

Linux Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings featuring 'Linux Engineer' in the job title relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised.

Linux Engineer job vacancy trend in the UK

Linux Engineer
Salary Trend

Salary distribution trend for Linux Engineer job vacancies in the UK.

Salary distribution trend for Linux Engineer job vacancies in the UK

Linux Engineer
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing Linux Engineer over the 6 months to 4 January 2026.

Salary histogram for Linux Engineer in the UK

Linux Engineer
Top 14 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Linux Engineer within the UK over the 6 months to 4 January 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 +95 167 £55,000 -9.84% 97
UK excluding London +102 122 £50,000 -9.09% 103
Work from Home +109 66 £72,500 +31.06% 84
London +42 58 £75,000 +3.45% 7
South East +38 35 £50,000 -6.54% 32
East of England +35 35 £45,000 -18.66% 24
North of England +32 20 £50,000 -20.00% 13
Scotland +11 13 £42,500 -15.00% 9
Midlands +18 12 £60,000 +2.13% 14
West Midlands +29 11 £55,000 -6.38% 7
Yorkshire -4 9 £32,500 - 7
South West +2 8 £53,000 +19.11% 12
North West +33 6 £50,000 -20.00% 5
North East - 5 £70,000 - 1

Linux Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities

For the 6 months to 4 January 2026, Linux Engineer job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all permanent job ads featuring Linux Engineer in the job title.

1 190 (100.00%) Linux
2 61 (32.11%) Python
3 52 (27.37%) AWS
4 51 (26.84%) Ansible
5 48 (25.26%) Bash
6 42 (22.11%) Red Hat
7 41 (21.58%) DevOps
8 38 (20.00%) Security Cleared
9 37 (19.47%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
10 33 (17.37%) Degree
10 33 (17.37%) Windows
11 32 (16.84%) Software Engineering
12 30 (15.79%) Terraform
13 29 (15.26%) Platform Engineering
14 28 (14.74%) VMware
15 26 (13.68%) Problem-Solving
16 25 (13.16%) Kubernetes
17 24 (12.63%) Unix
18 22 (11.58%) C++
19 21 (11.05%) Perl
20 19 (10.00%) CI/CD
20 19 (10.00%) Infrastructure as Code
20 19 (10.00%) Infrastructure Engineering
21 18 (9.47%) Azure
21 18 (9.47%) C
21 18 (9.47%) Embedded Linux
21 18 (9.47%) Microsoft
21 18 (9.47%) SQL
22 17 (8.95%) VMware Infrastructure
23 16 (8.42%) Amazon EC2

Linux Engineer Skill Set
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 8 (4.21%) WebSphere
2 5 (2.63%) Tomcat
2 5 (2.63%) WebSphere Application Server
3 4 (2.11%) Apache
4 2 (1.05%) JBoss
4 2 (1.05%) Microsoft Exchange
4 2 (1.05%) nginx
Applications
1 1 (0.53%) Microsoft Office
Cloud Services
1 52 (27.37%) AWS
2 18 (9.47%) Azure
3 16 (8.42%) Amazon EC2
3 16 (8.42%) SaaS
4 12 (6.32%) Virtual Private Cloud
5 10 (5.26%) Amazon EKS
5 10 (5.26%) GCP
6 9 (4.74%) Cohesity
6 9 (4.74%) Microsoft 365
7 8 (4.21%) Amazon CloudWatch
7 8 (4.21%) GitHub
7 8 (4.21%) Route 53
8 7 (3.68%) Amazon S3
9 6 (3.16%) AWS CloudFormation
10 5 (2.63%) Amazon ECR
10 5 (2.63%) Amazon ElastiCache
10 5 (2.63%) Amazon OpenSearch
10 5 (2.63%) AWS Lambda
10 5 (2.63%) CloudFront
10 5 (2.63%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 14 (7.37%) Firewall
2 13 (6.84%) SAN
3 11 (5.79%) DNS
4 10 (5.26%) TCP/IP
5 8 (4.21%) DHCP
5 8 (4.21%) LAN
5 8 (4.21%) WAN
6 7 (3.68%) SSL
7 6 (3.16%) Fibre Channel
7 6 (3.16%) SSH
8 4 (2.11%) PuTTY
9 3 (1.58%) Ethernet
9 3 (1.58%) HTTP
9 3 (1.58%) InfiniBand
10 2 (1.05%) 3G
10 2 (1.05%) FTP
10 2 (1.05%) iSCSI
10 2 (1.05%) Network Security
10 2 (1.05%) SMTP
10 2 (1.05%) SNMP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 14 (7.37%) SQL Server
2 13 (6.84%) PostgreSQL
3 12 (6.32%) Amazon RDS
4 10 (5.26%) MySQL
5 5 (2.63%) Amazon Aurora
5 5 (2.63%) DB2
6 1 (0.53%) NoSQL
Development Applications
1 9 (4.74%) Git
2 6 (3.16%) Jenkins
3 2 (1.05%) Ant
3 2 (1.05%) Artifactory
3 2 (1.05%) GitLab
3 2 (1.05%) JIRA
3 2 (1.05%) Maven
3 2 (1.05%) Sonatype Nexus
3 2 (1.05%) Subversion
3 2 (1.05%) Vagrant
4 1 (0.53%) Testinfra
General
1 34 (17.89%) Social Skills
2 33 (17.37%) Finance
3 10 (5.26%) Public Sector
4 9 (4.74%) Manufacturing
4 9 (4.74%) Retail
5 8 (4.21%) Pharmaceutical
6 6 (3.16%) Banking
7 5 (2.63%) Organisational Skills
8 3 (1.58%) Telecoms
9 2 (1.05%) Analytical Skills
9 2 (1.05%) Military
9 2 (1.05%) Presentation Skills
10 1 (0.53%) Electronics
10 1 (0.53%) Investment Banking
10 1 (0.53%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 7 (3.68%) LDAP
2 6 (3.16%) LAMP
3 5 (2.63%) LAPP Stack
3 5 (2.63%) Loki
3 5 (2.63%) WebSphere MQ
4 4 (2.11%) Middleware
5 3 (1.58%) Elastic Stack
6 2 (1.05%) Kafka
7 1 (0.53%) JSON
7 1 (0.53%) REST
7 1 (0.53%) XML
7 1 (0.53%) XMPP
Miscellaneous
1 10 (5.26%) Management Information System
2 8 (4.21%) Driving Licence
3 6 (3.16%) Hedge funds
3 6 (3.16%) Linux Command Line
4 5 (2.63%) Data Centre
5 4 (2.11%) Onboarding
5 4 (2.11%) Video on Demand
5 4 (2.11%) Video\Live Streaming
6 2 (1.05%) Cloud Native
6 2 (1.05%) FPGA
6 2 (1.05%) Public Cloud
7 1 (0.53%) Embedded Systems
7 1 (0.53%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 190 (100.00%) Linux
2 37 (19.47%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 33 (17.37%) Windows
4 24 (12.63%) Unix
5 18 (9.47%) Embedded Linux
6 13 (6.84%) CentOS
7 12 (6.32%) Debian
7 12 (6.32%) Solaris
8 9 (4.74%) Ubuntu
9 6 (3.16%) VMS
10 3 (1.58%) Rocky
11 2 (1.05%) FreeRTOS
11 2 (1.05%) Oracle Linux
11 2 (1.05%) Windows Server
11 2 (1.05%) Windows Server 2019
12 1 (0.53%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 41 (21.58%) DevOps
2 32 (16.84%) Software Engineering
3 29 (15.26%) Platform Engineering
4 26 (13.68%) Problem-Solving
5 19 (10.00%) CI/CD
5 19 (10.00%) Infrastructure as Code
5 19 (10.00%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 16 (8.42%) Disaster Recovery
6 16 (8.42%) High Availability
7 13 (6.84%) Computer Science
8 12 (6.32%) Service Delivery
9 11 (5.79%) Continuous Improvement
9 11 (5.79%) Security Hardening
10 10 (5.26%) Containerisation
10 10 (5.26%) Customer Service
10 10 (5.26%) ITIL
10 10 (5.26%) Root Cause Analysis
10 10 (5.26%) Stakeholder Management
11 9 (4.74%) E-Commerce
11 9 (4.74%) Logistics
Programming Languages
1 61 (32.11%) Python
2 48 (25.26%) Bash
3 22 (11.58%) C++
4 21 (11.05%) Perl
5 18 (9.47%) C
5 18 (9.47%) SQL
6 12 (6.32%) Java
7 10 (5.26%) Korn
8 8 (4.21%) Embedded C++
8 8 (4.21%) PL/SQL
9 7 (3.68%) Shell Script
10 6 (3.16%) PowerShell
11 5 (2.63%) Embedded C
12 4 (2.11%) DCL
12 4 (2.11%) Groovy
12 4 (2.11%) Tcl
13 2 (1.05%) C#
13 2 (1.05%) Ruby
14 1 (0.53%) PHP
Qualifications
1 38 (20.00%) Security Cleared
2 33 (17.37%) Degree
3 16 (8.42%) SC Cleared
4 11 (5.79%) Computer Science Degree
5 10 (5.26%) DV Cleared
5 10 (5.26%) RHCE
6 9 (4.74%) AWS Certification
7 5 (2.63%) ITIL Certification
8 3 (1.58%) RHCSA
9 2 (1.05%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
10 1 (0.53%) CISA
10 1 (0.53%) CISSP
10 1 (0.53%) CompTIA CySA+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 13 (6.84%) SLA
2 10 (5.26%) GDPR
2 10 (5.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
3 2 (1.05%) MISRA
4 1 (0.53%) Def Stans
4 1 (0.53%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 1 (0.53%) NIST
System Software
1 17 (8.95%) VMware Infrastructure
2 13 (6.84%) Active Directory
3 10 (5.26%) Docker
4 7 (3.68%) vSphere
5 6 (3.16%) NFS
6 3 (1.58%) Lustre
6 3 (1.58%) Slurm Workload Manager
6 3 (1.58%) Virtual Machines
7 2 (1.05%) Citrix Hypervisor
7 2 (1.05%) Embedded Firmware
7 2 (1.05%) Firmware
8 1 (0.53%) KVM
8 1 (0.53%) vCloud
8 1 (0.53%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 51 (26.84%) Ansible
2 30 (15.79%) Terraform
3 25 (13.16%) Kubernetes
4 11 (5.79%) Red Hat Satellite
5 6 (3.16%) Grafana
5 6 (3.16%) Prometheus
6 5 (2.63%) Nagios
7 3 (1.58%) Podman
7 3 (1.58%) Puppet
8 2 (1.05%) Red Hat Spacewalk
9 1 (0.53%) Microsoft Intune
9 1 (0.53%) Packer
9 1 (0.53%) Proxmox
9 1 (0.53%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 42 (22.11%) Red Hat
2 28 (14.74%) VMware
3 18 (9.47%) Microsoft
4 12 (6.32%) NetApp
5 11 (5.79%) IBM
6 7 (3.68%) Cisco
7 6 (3.16%) Commvault
7 6 (3.16%) Google
7 6 (3.16%) Pure Storage
8 4 (2.11%) Atlassian
8 4 (2.11%) Dell
8 4 (2.11%) Oracle
9 3 (1.58%) EMC
9 3 (1.58%) Mellanox
9 3 (1.58%) Splunk
10 2 (1.05%) Dynatrace
10 2 (1.05%) HP
11 1 (0.53%) Meraki
11 1 (0.53%) Mirantis
11 1 (0.53%) Ubiquiti