Principal Data Engineer Job Trends

Principal Data Engineer
UK

The median Principal Data Engineer salary in the UK is £90,000 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 23 June 2026.

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

6 months to
23 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 696 664 680
Rank change year-on-year -32 +16 +139
Permanent jobs requiring a Principal Data Engineer 45 7 214
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.048% 0.015% 0.20%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.051% 0.017% 0.21%
Number of salaries quoted 27 7 31
10th Percentile £83,050 £72,750 £62,500
25th Percentile £84,375 £81,250 £66,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £90,000 £85,000 £80,000
Median % change year-on-year +5.88% +6.25% -42.86%
75th Percentile £95,625 £125,000 £100,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £135,000 £111,250
UK excluding London median annual salary £90,000 £82,500 £70,000
% change year-on-year +9.09% +17.86% +41.41%

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 89,062 40,399 103,075
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 94.02% 89.44% 94.75%
Number of salaries quoted 61,111 23,040 74,444
10th Percentile £30,000 £28,750 £28,500
25th Percentile £40,000 £38,750 £38,567
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £57,500 £52,500
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% +9.52% -12.50%
75th Percentile £75,000 £77,500 £70,000
90th Percentile £95,000 £98,474 £90,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £50,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year - - -6.54%

Principal Data Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Principal Data Engineer job vacancy trend in the UK

Principal Data Engineer
Salary Trend

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

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

Principal Data Engineer
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing Principal Data Engineer over the 6 months to 23 June 2026.

Salary histogram for Principal Data Engineer in the UK

Principal Data Engineer
Top 9 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Principal Data Engineer within the UK over the 6 months to 23 June 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 31 £90,000 +5.88% 8
London -11 22 £88,750 -31.73% 2
Work from Home +17 10 £87,500 +6.06% 4
UK excluding London -61 10 £90,000 +9.09% 7
North of England -24 8 £90,000 +5.88% 4
North West +11 4 £91,250 +7.35% 1
Yorkshire - 4 £78,500 - 3
South West -57 1 £100,000 +66.67%
Scotland - 1 - - 1

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

For the 6 months to 23 June 2026, Principal Data 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 Data Engineer in the job title.

1 28 (62.22%) Data Engineering
2 27 (60.00%) Technical Leadership
3 26 (57.78%) Python
3 26 (57.78%) SQL
4 24 (53.33%) CI/CD
4 24 (53.33%) GCP
4 24 (53.33%) Mentoring
5 23 (51.11%) Google
6 20 (44.44%) Data Pipeline
7 19 (42.22%) Agile
7 19 (42.22%) Data Lake
8 18 (40.00%) BigQuery
8 18 (40.00%) Semantic Layer
9 17 (37.78%) Apache Airflow
9 17 (37.78%) Cost Control
9 17 (37.78%) Data Modelling
9 17 (37.78%) Data Quality
10 16 (35.56%) Coaching
10 16 (35.56%) Data Ingestion
10 16 (35.56%) Platform Engineering
11 15 (33.33%) Data Governance
12 13 (28.89%) Batch Management
12 13 (28.89%) DBS Check
12 13 (28.89%) Scrum
12 13 (28.89%) SDLC
13 12 (26.67%) Collaborative Working
14 11 (24.44%) Domain-Driven Design
14 11 (24.44%) Problem-Solving
14 11 (24.44%) Process Improvement
14 11 (24.44%) Product Thinking

Principal Data 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 17 (37.78%) Apache Airflow
2 2 (4.44%) Apache Spark
3 1 (2.22%) Apache Solr
Cloud Services
1 24 (53.33%) GCP
2 9 (20.00%) Azure
2 9 (20.00%) dbt
3 8 (17.78%) AWS
4 4 (8.89%) Cloud Composer
5 3 (6.67%) PaaS
5 3 (6.67%) SaaS
5 3 (6.67%) Snowflake
6 2 (4.44%) AWS Lambda
6 2 (4.44%) Azure Data Factory
6 2 (4.44%) Serverless
7 1 (2.22%) Amazon OpenSearch
7 1 (2.22%) Amazon S3
7 1 (2.22%) AWS Step Functions
7 1 (2.22%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 1 (2.22%) Broadband
Database & Business Intelligence
1 19 (42.22%) Data Lake
2 18 (40.00%) BigQuery
2 18 (40.00%) Semantic Layer
3 4 (8.89%) Data Warehouse
4 2 (4.44%) Big Data
4 2 (4.44%) PostgreSQL
5 1 (2.22%) Amazon Athena
5 1 (2.22%) Amazon QuickSight
5 1 (2.22%) Apache Iceberg
5 1 (2.22%) DynamoDB
5 1 (2.22%) Elasticsearch
5 1 (2.22%) Flink
5 1 (2.22%) Parquet
5 1 (2.22%) Presto
5 1 (2.22%) Redis
5 1 (2.22%) Trino
Development Applications
1 2 (4.44%) Jenkins
2 1 (2.22%) Git
2 1 (2.22%) GitLab
General
1 14 (31.11%) Inclusion and Diversity
2 12 (26.67%) Social Skills
3 2 (4.44%) Finance
4 1 (2.22%) Billing
4 1 (2.22%) Public Sector
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (4.44%) PySpark
2 1 (2.22%) JSON
2 1 (2.22%) Kafka
2 1 (2.22%) Node.js
2 1 (2.22%) REST
2 1 (2.22%) Spring
2 1 (2.22%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 12 (26.67%) Distributed Systems
2 11 (24.44%) Cloud Native
2 11 (24.44%) Self-Motivation
3 1 (2.22%) Algorithms
3 1 (2.22%) Public Cloud
Processes & Methodologies
1 28 (62.22%) Data Engineering
2 27 (60.00%) Technical Leadership
3 24 (53.33%) CI/CD
3 24 (53.33%) Mentoring
4 20 (44.44%) Data Pipeline
5 19 (42.22%) Agile
6 17 (37.78%) Cost Control
6 17 (37.78%) Data Modelling
7 16 (35.56%) Coaching
7 16 (35.56%) Data Ingestion
7 16 (35.56%) Platform Engineering
8 15 (33.33%) Data Governance
9 13 (28.89%) Batch Management
9 13 (28.89%) Scrum
9 13 (28.89%) SDLC
10 12 (26.67%) Collaborative Working
11 11 (24.44%) Domain-Driven Design
11 11 (24.44%) Problem-Solving
11 11 (24.44%) Process Improvement
11 11 (24.44%) Product Thinking
Programming Languages
1 26 (57.78%) Python
1 26 (57.78%) SQL
2 1 (2.22%) Java
2 1 (2.22%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 13 (28.89%) DBS Check
2 3 (6.67%) Degree
3 1 (2.22%) Azure Certification
3 1 (2.22%) SC Cleared
3 1 (2.22%) Security Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 17 (37.78%) Data Quality
System Software
1 6 (13.33%) Docker
Systems Management
1 9 (20.00%) Terraform
2 2 (4.44%) Kubernetes
3 1 (2.22%) Ansible
3 1 (2.22%) Packer
Vendors
1 23 (51.11%) Google
2 5 (11.11%) Databricks
3 1 (2.22%) Oracle