Data Engineer Salary: Your 2025 Guide

As a data engineer, you organise databases and data warehouses, optimising them for data storage and retrieval. Data engineers help companies make sense of big data with SQL, NoSQL, or hybrid infrastructures. 

It's easier than ever to collect, store, and analyse massive amounts of data. This has consequently led to increased demand for database engineer skills and experience. According to Glassdoor, data engineers earn an average annual salary of £47,866 in the UK as of November 2024 [1].

Discover what data engineers do, what can affect data engineer salaries, and how you can make a start on this exciting career path. 

What does a data engineer do?

Data engineers are responsible for the engineering behind the systems that store, extract, and process data. In this role, you build and maintain applications' databases and manage the infrastructure that allows them to run. As a data engineer, you might be responsible for a SQL data store and a MongoDB NoSQL data warehouse, where you’ll take care of all the activities that ensure that data is accessible.

Data engineers are also part of a team that includes software engineers and developers, data analysts, and designers. With this team, you have the expertise to collect and manipulate data others use to achieve critical business objectives.

Data engineer responsibilities vary widely by organisation. As a data engineer, you may do some or all of the following:

• Design indexes on data stores (where queries will be fast) 

• Choose the best storage technology (SQL or NoSQL) 

• Ensure that the datastore is up-to-date and replicating it across multiple machines 

• Tune data warehouses 

• Create query plans and validate results

• Identify patterns in historical data 

• Analyse and optimise database performance

In a career as a data engineer, you’ll combine cutting-edge technical skills with creativity and often do so in business-critical applications.

How much do data engineers make?

Glassdoor says the average data engineer earns £47,866 annually [1]. Meanwhile, the average salary for a senior data engineer is £65,759 a year [2]. Generally, you can earn a higher-than-average salary as a data engineer.

Factors affecting salary

How much you’ll earn as a data engineer depends on your level of education, certifications, years of experience, company size, industry, and location. Here's what you need to know:

Education

An undergraduate degree is often the minimum requirement for data engineering positions. Companies often require a master's degree or professional doctorate and are typically looking to hire senior-level data engineers with proven leadership skills and industry experience. Advanced degrees can increase earning potential by rapidly elevating you to senior roles. 

Certifications

Specialised certifications, such as Cloudera Certified Data Engineer, demonstrate specific skills employers seek. Certifications from IBM, Amazon, Google, Oracle, and Microsoft can also help you earn more and get jobs in specialist roles. Here are some data engineer certifications to consider:

• Data Engineer Certifications by Microsoft

• SAS Certified Big Data Professional

• Google Professional Data Engineer

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) Certified Data Analytics – Specialty

• Cloudera Data Platform Generalist Certification

Level of experience 

As you gain more experience as a data engineer, your salary will likely increase. In general, data engineers with more experience can take more senior positions with higher pay. For example, a senior data engineer can expect an average salary of £65,759 per year in the UK, while a lead data engineer will earn £71,889 on average [2, 3].

Location

How much you'll earn as a data engineer will differ by location. At least a part of the reason for the salary disparity between regions is that the cost of living in different regions will differ for the same standard of living. Average data engineer salaries in cities around the UK as of November  2024 include:

• Birmingham: £42,501

• Coventry: £37,796

• Newcastle under Lyme: £43,931

• Cardiff: £41,640

• Newport: £45,157

• Edinburgh, £42,856

• Belfast: £40,094

• Swansea: £39,304

• Cambridge: £48,482

• Manchester: £43,386

• Newry: £40,494

• Hereford: £45,103

• Leeds: £43,022

• Durham: £43,724

• Derry: £40,094

• Chester: £42,952

• Exeter: £44,844

• Dundee: £38,326

• Bath: £44,961

• Oxford: £50,883

*All data was sourced from Glassdoor in November 2024. 

Company size

Company size often impacts data engineer salaries. Companies offering higher salaries tend to be more significant employers—such as IBM, Amazon, Meta, and Google—and often have larger, more experienced data science teams.

Job title variations and salary

Data Engineer job titles vary by company, tasks, and skills required. Some common titles that data engineers can have in the UK include:

• Cloud data engineer: £52,720

• AI/ML engineer: £55,903

• Big data engineer: £46,683

• Data science engineer: £44,860

• Database architect: £65,240

• Enterprise database architect: £68,608

• Hadoop engineer: £46,370

• Information systems engineer: £33,823

*All salary data is sourced from Glassdoor in November 2024. 

How to become a data engineer: Next steps

To become a data engineer, work to build and demonstrate a solid competency base across database technologies and coding. Typically, data engineers need an undergraduate or postgraduate degree and professional experience. Consider studying a degree subject such as computer science, maths, or similar. For some roles, you may also need postgraduate qualifications in a subject like data analysis or big data.

Employers may expect you to have experience, so it’s a good idea to take an internship or build your own experience through personal projects and data science competitions online.

Make a start with data engineering with Coursera

Data engineering is a technical career with good prospects and a higher-than-average salary. This is especially true as you work up to senior positions. If you’re ready to take the next step in your data engineering career, you may want to consider the Data Engineering Foundations Specialisation offered by IBM on Coursera or the IBM Data Engineering Professional Certificate. These provide you with the opportunity to learn foundational knowledge in data engineering.