Hiring outlook, remote working rates, and which companies are actively recruiting.
Every company investing in AI infrastructure needs clean, reliable data pipelines first. That dependency has made data engineering one of the most consistently hired-for disciplines in Irish tech through 2025 and into 2026.
of UK Data Engineer roles advertise remote or hybrid working
Year-on-year salary movement in UK. Positive movement signals active market competition.
Strongest in: Scale-up and enterprise AI data infrastructure
Every company investing in AI infrastructure needs clean, reliable data pipelines first. That dependency has made data engineering one of the most consistently hired-for disciplines in Irish tech through 2025 and into 2026.
Who companies hire: Strong Python skills, SQL fluency, and comfort with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) are the primary entry points. Software engineers transitioning in find the shift is mostly domain knowledge rather than new fundamentals.
Salary premium over the UK median for Data Engineers who list these skills.
Companies with consistent or active Data Engineer hiring in UK.
Demand is strong and growing. Every AI initiative in Irish tech requires a data engineering function underneath it. Companies that tried to skip the data infrastructure step in 2022 are now backfilling it urgently.
LinkedIn, Workday, Zalando, and Stripe are the most consistent volume hirers. AWS has expanded its data engineering teams in Dublin significantly. Among growth-stage companies, Degreed and Mastercard have been active.
Around 74% of active listings advertise remote or hybrid working. Pipeline and infrastructure work is largely asynchronous, which makes the role one of the most remote-friendly in the data discipline.
Kafka expertise commands the highest premium at around 18%. dbt Cloud, Apache Spark, and Snowflake proficiency follow. Engineers who can design real-time streaming architectures consistently sit in the top salary quartile regardless of company size.
Kafka is currently the higher-demand skill for new hires, driven by the shift toward real-time data architectures. Spark remains essential at companies handling very large-scale batch processing. Most senior job descriptions expect familiarity with both.