Principal Cloud Engineer Job Trends

Principal Cloud Engineer
UK

The median Principal Cloud Engineer salary in the UK is £107,500 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 14 January 2026.

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

6 months to
14 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 643 697 659
Rank change year-on-year +54 -38 +303
Permanent jobs requiring a Principal Cloud Engineer 10 2 62
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.017% 0.004% 0.11%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.018% 0.004% 0.12%
Number of salaries quoted 6 2 13
10th Percentile £86,250 £75,500 -
25th Percentile £100,000 £76,250 £87,049
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £107,500 £80,000 £92,169
Median % change year-on-year +34.38% -13.20% +8.43%
75th Percentile £122,500 £86,250 £97,500
90th Percentile - £88,500 -
UK excluding London median annual salary £100,000 £85,000 £92,169
% change year-on-year +17.65% -7.78% +22.89%

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 54,426 49,714 53,040
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 90.72% 92.90% 95.25%
Number of salaries quoted 33,710 25,743 40,880
10th Percentile £28,500 £33,625 £30,000
25th Percentile £37,000 £45,000 £41,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £60,000 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £75,000 £78,750 £77,500
90th Percentile £95,000 £97,500 £96,250
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £52,609 £50,000
% change year-on-year -4.96% +5.22% -5.25%

Principal Cloud Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Principal Cloud Engineer job vacancy trend in the UK

Principal Cloud Engineer
Salary Trend

Salary distribution trend for Principal Cloud Engineer job vacancies in the UK.

Salary distribution trend for Principal Cloud Engineer job vacancies in the UK

Principal Cloud Engineer
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing Principal Cloud Engineer over the 6 months to 14 January 2026.

Salary histogram for Principal Cloud Engineer in the UK

Principal Cloud Engineer
Top 5 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Principal Cloud Engineer within the UK over the 6 months to 14 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 +66 5 £115,000 +35.29%
London - 3 £115,000 -
Work from Home - 3 £100,000 -
UK excluding London +58 2 £100,000 +17.65%
East of England - 2 £100,000 -

Principal Cloud Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities

For the 6 months to 14 January 2026, Principal Cloud 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 Principal Cloud Engineer in the job title.

1 10 (100.00%) CI/CD
2 8 (80.00%) Terraform
3 6 (60.00%) AWS
3 6 (60.00%) AWS Certification
3 6 (60.00%) Serverless
4 5 (50.00%) Azure
4 5 (50.00%) DevOps
4 5 (50.00%) Roadmaps
5 4 (40.00%) Ansible
5 4 (40.00%) DBS Check
5 4 (40.00%) GCP
5 4 (40.00%) Infrastructure as Code
5 4 (40.00%) Puppet
5 4 (40.00%) Technical Leadership
5 4 (40.00%) Technology Roadmap
6 3 (30.00%) AI
6 3 (30.00%) Docker
6 3 (30.00%) Machine Learning
7 2 (20.00%) Amazon Bedrock
7 2 (20.00%) Amazon EKS
7 2 (20.00%) Amazon EventBridge
7 2 (20.00%) Amazon Kinesis
7 2 (20.00%) Amazon SQS
7 2 (20.00%) Analytics
7 2 (20.00%) AngularJS
7 2 (20.00%) API Integration
7 2 (20.00%) Architectural Patterns
7 2 (20.00%) AWS Certified Developer
7 2 (20.00%) AWS Lambda
7 2 (20.00%) AWS Step Functions

Principal Cloud 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:

Cloud Services
1 6 (60.00%) AWS
1 6 (60.00%) Serverless
2 5 (50.00%) Azure
3 4 (40.00%) GCP
4 2 (20.00%) Amazon Bedrock
4 2 (20.00%) Amazon EKS
4 2 (20.00%) Amazon EventBridge
4 2 (20.00%) Amazon Kinesis
4 2 (20.00%) Amazon SQS
4 2 (20.00%) AWS Lambda
4 2 (20.00%) AWS Step Functions
4 2 (20.00%) Azure AKS
5 1 (10.00%) IaaS
5 1 (10.00%) PaaS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 2 (20.00%) DynamoDB
General
1 4 (40.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
2 1 (10.00%) Finance
2 1 (10.00%) Social Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (20.00%) AngularJS
1 2 (20.00%) Hugging Face
1 2 (20.00%) Kafka
1 2 (20.00%) Node.js
1 2 (20.00%) Nuxt
1 2 (20.00%) RabbitMQ
1 2 (20.00%) React
1 2 (20.00%) Vue
Miscellaneous
1 3 (30.00%) Cloud Native
2 2 (20.00%) Distributed Systems
3 1 (10.00%) Blog
Operating Systems
1 1 (10.00%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 10 (100.00%) CI/CD
2 5 (50.00%) DevOps
2 5 (50.00%) Roadmaps
3 4 (40.00%) Infrastructure as Code
3 4 (40.00%) Technical Leadership
3 4 (40.00%) Technology Roadmap
4 3 (30.00%) AI
4 3 (30.00%) Machine Learning
5 2 (20.00%) Analytics
5 2 (20.00%) API Integration
5 2 (20.00%) Architectural Patterns
5 2 (20.00%) Batch Processing
5 2 (20.00%) Containerisation
5 2 (20.00%) Customer Engagement
5 2 (20.00%) Data Analytics
5 2 (20.00%) Data Science
5 2 (20.00%) Event-Driven Architecture
5 2 (20.00%) Microservices
5 2 (20.00%) Observability
5 2 (20.00%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 2 (20.00%) Python
Qualifications
1 6 (60.00%) AWS Certification
2 4 (40.00%) DBS Check
3 2 (20.00%) AWS Certified Developer
4 1 (10.00%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
4 1 (10.00%) Azure Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (20.00%) GDPR
1 2 (20.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
1 2 (20.00%) PCI DSS
1 2 (20.00%) SOC 2
System Software
1 3 (30.00%) Docker
2 1 (10.00%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 8 (80.00%) Terraform
2 4 (40.00%) Ansible
2 4 (40.00%) Puppet
3 2 (20.00%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 2 (20.00%) OpenAI
2 1 (10.00%) VMware