Hiring outlook, remote working rates, and which companies are actively recruiting.
Data Engineer hiring in the UK is being driven by the UK's regional tech clusters in Manchester, Leeds, and Edinburgh scaling their data teams, with demand concentrated in London first, followed by Edinburgh and Bristol. Sky and HSBC are among the more consistent UK hirers, and post-Brexit visa sponsorship routes have made it easier for UK employers to bring in senior Kafka specialists from overseas when the domestic pipeline of that expertise runs short.
Share of United Kingdom Data Engineer roles advertising remote or hybrid working.
We will publish a year-on-year pay change for Data Engineer in United Kingdom once a comparable annual benchmark is available.
Strongest in: Insurance and asset management modelling teams, led by employers such as Sky and HSBC
Data Engineer hiring in the UK is being driven by the UK's regional tech clusters in Manchester, Leeds, and Edinburgh scaling their data teams, with demand concentrated in London first, followed by Edinburgh and Bristol. Sky and HSBC are among the more consistent UK hirers, and post-Brexit visa sponsorship routes have made it easier for UK employers to bring in senior Kafka specialists from overseas when the domestic pipeline of that expertise runs short.
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 United Kingdom median for Data Engineers who list these skills.
Companies with consistent or active Data Engineer hiring in United Kingdom.
Market intelligence
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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.