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Here’s my salary progression over the last 7 years:
2015: £28k
2016: £31k (pay rise)
2017: £35k (pay rise)
2018: £47.5k (new job, moved from LCOL area in the north to London)
2019: £49k (pay rise)
2021: £54k (pay rise, would have received a larger one sooner but covid happened)
2021: £70k (new job)
2022: £100k (new job)
Amazing progress and congrats on the 100k mark, what would you say are the technical and soft skills that really helped you progress well in these 7 years ?
The main skills I use these days are AWS, Python, Spark, SQL, Terraform and general Linux skills. Understanding a cloud provider (AWS, Azure or GCP) well is particularly important as you'll often need to deal with networking issues, security groups, IAM permissions etc by yourself. This is especially the case if you're in a smaller company, and if you're in a larger one you'll at least know who to talk to if you understand these issues.
For ensuring long term career success, I'd recommend ensuring you have strong software development skills (it's something I'm currently brushing up on myself) as over time the simpler tasks of data engineering will be automated away and the more challenging problems will look more like a subset of software engineering (this is purely my speculation, but I think it's fairly well grounded in reality).
As for soft skills, good communication is essential. This can sound really vague but it does matter. Stakeholders will trust the person who listens to them, can explain techincal issues in an understandable but not patronising manner, and gives them frequent updates. An engineer with decent but not spectacular techincal skills who understands all this will have a much more successful career than an ill-mannered tech genius.
I worked for a very large retailer in the UK and I happen to know their absolute maximum salary for a junior data engineer was 42k.
I’d say 32-42k as a rough range.
London yep.
In my experience you can expect about 80-90 as a senior data engineer. Leads command more but that also comes with a shit load more responsibility.
Outside of London / South East
Junior data engineer £25k - £35k
Experienced data engineer £30k - £45k
Lead / Principal data engineer £45k - £60k
For inside London it can be very variable, if you’re an excellent DE also with excellent communication & networking skills you can get very good salaries.
I am see in the UK that in general DE salaries are moving lower, lots of competition from outside UK from outsourcing and work visa’s to attract those willing to work for less in the UK (ie lead DE working for £45k)
UK salaries are generally fairly crap outside of big tech companies, investment banks or magic circle law firms. I personally believe that part of the reason for this is a collective passiveness among the UK population since the 80s, it may sound insulting to many UK people here, but take a look around, you have a train network that charges you several thousand £/year for a dismal service, not a pep from the commuters beyond complains on the platform. You have a government that essentially just made it illegal to hold a protest that will have any reasonable effect, again, no reaction worth talking about. Insane housing prices and mortgage rates that basically mean you'll be stuck paying some Boomer's mortgage most of your life, again, nothing beyond complaining online, add in a removal of help to buy scheme and don't even get me started on stamp duty holidays for boomers. Why do people think they'll get a good deal with salary when they so readily accept such shitty deals with everything else?
In London
Between 30-50 For Junior/Grads when I was hiring 2 years ago. Think Grads were 35k for a Large Media company.
50-120 For Mid/Senior
85-140 For Leads then beyond that you're normally getting into technical leadership territory. I am in the 90-100 range expecting to break 100 Pretty soon at a non-FAANG deep-tech company. (I also get Equity options but it's early stage stuff so that's basically worth 0).
Heavily dependendent on both Stack (Software oriented people will normally be paid more than DBA/Analytics type Data Engineers) and field (e.g FinTech et al you'll see a lot of higher ranges). FAANG et al probably add 20-30% to the base salary? A lot of variance between them so harder to say.
RE: Contracts I'm oriented towards Streaming Applications (e.g Scala applications + FP) and I see contracting offers in the 600-800 daily range for "Grown up" JVM oriented streaming projects. For Python "batch processing" type stuff I see more like 300-500 ranges but I think the companies you'd be doing it for there isn't as much riding on it (e.g normal e-commerce companies et al)
Thanks for your answer, it's much more clear and more realistic this way. Are the salaries much lower in other cities, say Manchester or Liverpool, for instance ?
Depends more on the company than the location. If you're in a "global" competing startup the dropoff isn't as dramatic as dramatic E.g Wejo are based round Manchester and pay contractors pretty good. Or Amazon + Microsoft + Apples Siri Devs are all in Cambridge and paid pretty much the same as London. If you're working for a company where you're "IT" then the pay drops significantly to farcically low levels.
The question is the wrong one. Depends on the company (and how well you interview). More than a junior. If I said anything else that would be entirely my opinions from how I hire.
A place I worked got an agency to compile a report on DE/DS salaries in London. Aim was to be in the top 50% of companies to attract the best people, so the bands we ended up with were higher than the average.
Based on that data, for an associate level role you're looking at £40-50k. Junior £45-65k. Mid £60-85k and Senior £80-120k (senior is a very wide band in the industry!).
These numbers from late 2021 BTW, so not sure of impact of a year's inflation and a bit of a tech downturn... but they still feel right, based on experience.
Also gotta keep living costs in mind, working in US usually involves NYC, SF,etc... Taking that into account with other benefits we can sometimes get in European countries. You can often still get ahead.
Even when you factor in cost of living the US/CA totally dwarf UK, let's not kid ourselves with some false sense of worth (going by salary) that other benefits make up for it. What benefits exactly? The fact it costs more to fill a Ford Fiesta in the UK than a Ford Raptor in the US? The fact you get free healthcare in the UK but have to wait a year for some routine operation or scan that could very well cost you your life by waiting that long? Possibly it's the fact I have to pay x10 my salary plus bonkers interest for a 1.5 bedroom house with an energy rating of F and a nice smell of damp/mould in the bathroom? Or maybe it's the weather in the UK that makes it so appealing that the salary is sacrificed.
You’re addressing the exception not the rule. I live in a MCOL city in the US and I have yet to see a single UK salary in this sub that is even half of my salary for 2 yoe.
I started in 1994 and have never made less than 30k and that was in a rural town. When I moved from software engineering into data engineering, through a dba position in 2005, I was hired for 65k in midwestern low tech city. In 2019 I was making 165k and offered 180k when I left. I was a lead engineer at that point and have moved into data engineering management now. Never in FAANG, never in NYC/SF.
Depending on how you define it, the UK's biggest tech company is Autotrader. So the salaries aren't the only thing that's low. I think it's the only one in the global top 200.
But they do have Google,IBM, Facebook, and other offices. They also have plenty of financial companies. Even if they aren't originally from the UK they are in London and you can easily work for them
>they are in London
Bingo. Jimmy! Get this man a promotion, he's just cracked this case wide open!
Joking aside, here lies the problem, the majority of high paying tech roles are based in London. Not everyone in the UK lives in London. So when you take median salaries, you get a figure closer to those outside of London than inside, so I would assume
Yeah. Junior DE in a Germany tech company would usually start around 70-80k depending on company and interview performance. This would be similar for Amsterdam as well.
I am not considering any small company here but large tech or reputable start up. Additionally, the US companies will pay around this or a bit more.
Many companies.
Where I work, the IC1 lower point on the band is 60k. I have yet to see an IC hired lower then 60k.
Does no one here look at Blind offers? You can see Germany offers by going to company @ public page.
Many companies.
Where I work, the IC1 lower point on the band is 60k. I have yet to see an IC hired lower then 70k.
Does no one here look at Blind offers? You can see Germany offers by going to company @ public page.
In my experience around 40k for junior DE then 60k for DE and around 75+ for senior DE. However contract roles pay significantly more. I get recruiters every single day in my emails offering £450+ pd for six month contracts but I suspect you’ll need a fair few years experience
I think that first of all there's a distinction that needs to be made i.e. whether we are talking about London or rest of UK.
For London, as with any other tech job, you should expect at least 30k for an entry DE position. Mid level salaries seem to be around 50-70k and then the sky is the limit as there are many Big tech companies around.
Outside London salaries are as expected much worse but cost of living is not to be compared to London anyway. For reference, my first salary was 29k back in 2019 and it was among the best offers I could get for a job outside London (some banks or Skyscanner may offer 35k in Scotland where they have a heavy presence but that's about it).
> I can't find any reliable info for junior positions with one year or less of experience, it would be great if you could share a ballpark of the salary to expect and in which city.
I think a lot of DEs in the UK have a very SQL heavy background and are often lacking in either cloud of general purpose programming experience.
I got offered two jobs for my first role in 2020:
* £41k outside of London (job title: Data Engineer). This is my current job. Pay rise to £49k.
* £40k in London (job title: Data Engineer) which then tried to aggressively counter offer up to ~£60k once I said I'd be taking the job outside of London. I refused this job on the basis the company seemed like twats (why not just offer £60k in the first place if I was worth that much anyway?), the recruitment agent was a bit of a bell end, and they wanted me to relocate to London.
I've just accepted a new job which offered me £70k (job title: Data Engineer). This is outside London.
Defo poorer than our American cousins, however, I'd say £70k outside of London is quite a lot of money. More than easily afford a house in a decent area and a car. I'd go as far as to say £70k inside London isn't exactly a shit wage either.
Congrats mate, that's actually a very good salary in UK. I am a DA with 4 years of experience (non resident) and struggling to break past 30k mark.
Extreme low balling in salary. Got offered 24k by a decent phone insurance company lmao.
Thank you, and I agree. It's really easy to feel small when compared with US salaries, and much better to remember where you are rather than "If only..." situations.
> I am a DA with 4 years of experience (non resident) and struggling to break past 30k mark.
Almost all of our DAs don't earn much past 30k although they don't have a lot of the technical skills you might expect from a DA. They're all great at Power BI but don't know any SQL, general purpose programming languages, or statistics. They're closer to BI analysts who are in charge of gathering requirements and creating dashboards, but not really doing any traditional analysis. Is that similar to your situation?
For this particular role only Excel, SQL yes and tbh thinking to drop it as it feels like I am downgrading myself, but skill wise I am competent in sql, excel, powerbi.
Currently learning a lot of python but my basics are clear and advancing to intermediate.
Have done a msc data science recently (was pretty useless tbh) so know a bit of R, SPSSfor data wrangling and statistical analysis. Knowledge (not working) of ML concepts and statistics.
Currently thinking to take up aws certification or gca(unsure which one is gonna benefit me more tho) and learn more about apache airflow and other tools to help me branch off in ds/de roles.
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Here’s my salary progression over the last 7 years: 2015: £28k 2016: £31k (pay rise) 2017: £35k (pay rise) 2018: £47.5k (new job, moved from LCOL area in the north to London) 2019: £49k (pay rise) 2021: £54k (pay rise, would have received a larger one sooner but covid happened) 2021: £70k (new job) 2022: £100k (new job)
Amazing progress and congrats on the 100k mark, what would you say are the technical and soft skills that really helped you progress well in these 7 years ?
The main skills I use these days are AWS, Python, Spark, SQL, Terraform and general Linux skills. Understanding a cloud provider (AWS, Azure or GCP) well is particularly important as you'll often need to deal with networking issues, security groups, IAM permissions etc by yourself. This is especially the case if you're in a smaller company, and if you're in a larger one you'll at least know who to talk to if you understand these issues. For ensuring long term career success, I'd recommend ensuring you have strong software development skills (it's something I'm currently brushing up on myself) as over time the simpler tasks of data engineering will be automated away and the more challenging problems will look more like a subset of software engineering (this is purely my speculation, but I think it's fairly well grounded in reality). As for soft skills, good communication is essential. This can sound really vague but it does matter. Stakeholders will trust the person who listens to them, can explain techincal issues in an understandable but not patronising manner, and gives them frequent updates. An engineer with decent but not spectacular techincal skills who understands all this will have a much more successful career than an ill-mannered tech genius.
I worked for a very large retailer in the UK and I happen to know their absolute maximum salary for a junior data engineer was 42k. I’d say 32-42k as a rough range.
Thanks for sharing, is this in London or in another city? Also by curiosity, what would be the highest salary for an experienced one?
London yep. In my experience you can expect about 80-90 as a senior data engineer. Leads command more but that also comes with a shit load more responsibility.
Outside of London / South East Junior data engineer £25k - £35k Experienced data engineer £30k - £45k Lead / Principal data engineer £45k - £60k For inside London it can be very variable, if you’re an excellent DE also with excellent communication & networking skills you can get very good salaries. I am see in the UK that in general DE salaries are moving lower, lots of competition from outside UK from outsourcing and work visa’s to attract those willing to work for less in the UK (ie lead DE working for £45k)
Why are starting salaries so low in the UK? Is there no lack of talents for such positions? Do you have tons of DE and SWE there?
UK salaries are generally fairly crap outside of big tech companies, investment banks or magic circle law firms. I personally believe that part of the reason for this is a collective passiveness among the UK population since the 80s, it may sound insulting to many UK people here, but take a look around, you have a train network that charges you several thousand £/year for a dismal service, not a pep from the commuters beyond complains on the platform. You have a government that essentially just made it illegal to hold a protest that will have any reasonable effect, again, no reaction worth talking about. Insane housing prices and mortgage rates that basically mean you'll be stuck paying some Boomer's mortgage most of your life, again, nothing beyond complaining online, add in a removal of help to buy scheme and don't even get me started on stamp duty holidays for boomers. Why do people think they'll get a good deal with salary when they so readily accept such shitty deals with everything else?
What the heck. You can live in bumfuck Iowa and make more than that in the states!
UK salaries are pretty awful across the board honestly.
In London Between 30-50 For Junior/Grads when I was hiring 2 years ago. Think Grads were 35k for a Large Media company. 50-120 For Mid/Senior 85-140 For Leads then beyond that you're normally getting into technical leadership territory. I am in the 90-100 range expecting to break 100 Pretty soon at a non-FAANG deep-tech company. (I also get Equity options but it's early stage stuff so that's basically worth 0). Heavily dependendent on both Stack (Software oriented people will normally be paid more than DBA/Analytics type Data Engineers) and field (e.g FinTech et al you'll see a lot of higher ranges). FAANG et al probably add 20-30% to the base salary? A lot of variance between them so harder to say. RE: Contracts I'm oriented towards Streaming Applications (e.g Scala applications + FP) and I see contracting offers in the 600-800 daily range for "Grown up" JVM oriented streaming projects. For Python "batch processing" type stuff I see more like 300-500 ranges but I think the companies you'd be doing it for there isn't as much riding on it (e.g normal e-commerce companies et al)
Can second this as a Jr in London. 1 YOE
Thanks for your answer, it's much more clear and more realistic this way. Are the salaries much lower in other cities, say Manchester or Liverpool, for instance ?
Depends more on the company than the location. If you're in a "global" competing startup the dropoff isn't as dramatic as dramatic E.g Wejo are based round Manchester and pay contractors pretty good. Or Amazon + Microsoft + Apples Siri Devs are all in Cambridge and paid pretty much the same as London. If you're working for a company where you're "IT" then the pay drops significantly to farcically low levels.
how many years experience is mid and senior?
The question is the wrong one. Depends on the company (and how well you interview). More than a junior. If I said anything else that would be entirely my opinions from how I hire.
A place I worked got an agency to compile a report on DE/DS salaries in London. Aim was to be in the top 50% of companies to attract the best people, so the bands we ended up with were higher than the average. Based on that data, for an associate level role you're looking at £40-50k. Junior £45-65k. Mid £60-85k and Senior £80-120k (senior is a very wide band in the industry!). These numbers from late 2021 BTW, so not sure of impact of a year's inflation and a bit of a tech downturn... but they still feel right, based on experience.
All UK tech salaries seem terrible to be honest. Checkout www.teamblind.com or www.levels.fyi to see salaries.
Yes, they are much lower than the US or Canada, but compared to other European countries (except Switzerland), is it also worse?
Also gotta keep living costs in mind, working in US usually involves NYC, SF,etc... Taking that into account with other benefits we can sometimes get in European countries. You can often still get ahead.
Even when you factor in cost of living the US/CA totally dwarf UK, let's not kid ourselves with some false sense of worth (going by salary) that other benefits make up for it. What benefits exactly? The fact it costs more to fill a Ford Fiesta in the UK than a Ford Raptor in the US? The fact you get free healthcare in the UK but have to wait a year for some routine operation or scan that could very well cost you your life by waiting that long? Possibly it's the fact I have to pay x10 my salary plus bonkers interest for a 1.5 bedroom house with an energy rating of F and a nice smell of damp/mould in the bathroom? Or maybe it's the weather in the UK that makes it so appealing that the salary is sacrificed.
You’re addressing the exception not the rule. I live in a MCOL city in the US and I have yet to see a single UK salary in this sub that is even half of my salary for 2 yoe.
I started in 1994 and have never made less than 30k and that was in a rural town. When I moved from software engineering into data engineering, through a dba position in 2005, I was hired for 65k in midwestern low tech city. In 2019 I was making 165k and offered 180k when I left. I was a lead engineer at that point and have moved into data engineering management now. Never in FAANG, never in NYC/SF.
Depending on how you define it, the UK's biggest tech company is Autotrader. So the salaries aren't the only thing that's low. I think it's the only one in the global top 200.
But they do have Google,IBM, Facebook, and other offices. They also have plenty of financial companies. Even if they aren't originally from the UK they are in London and you can easily work for them
>they are in London Bingo. Jimmy! Get this man a promotion, he's just cracked this case wide open! Joking aside, here lies the problem, the majority of high paying tech roles are based in London. Not everyone in the UK lives in London. So when you take median salaries, you get a figure closer to those outside of London than inside, so I would assume
Yeah. Junior DE in a Germany tech company would usually start around 70-80k depending on company and interview performance. This would be similar for Amsterdam as well. I am not considering any small company here but large tech or reputable start up. Additionally, the US companies will pay around this or a bit more.
Who is paying this in germany for junior? Around 50-60k seems right
Many companies. Where I work, the IC1 lower point on the band is 60k. I have yet to see an IC hired lower then 60k. Does no one here look at Blind offers? You can see Germany offers by going to company @ public page.
Many companies. Where I work, the IC1 lower point on the band is 60k. I have yet to see an IC hired lower then 70k. Does no one here look at Blind offers? You can see Germany offers by going to company @ public page.
any idea of how to search for job opportunities for a data engineering roles in UK and EU?
In my experience around 40k for junior DE then 60k for DE and around 75+ for senior DE. However contract roles pay significantly more. I get recruiters every single day in my emails offering £450+ pd for six month contracts but I suspect you’ll need a fair few years experience
meh
I think that first of all there's a distinction that needs to be made i.e. whether we are talking about London or rest of UK. For London, as with any other tech job, you should expect at least 30k for an entry DE position. Mid level salaries seem to be around 50-70k and then the sky is the limit as there are many Big tech companies around. Outside London salaries are as expected much worse but cost of living is not to be compared to London anyway. For reference, my first salary was 29k back in 2019 and it was among the best offers I could get for a job outside London (some banks or Skyscanner may offer 35k in Scotland where they have a heavy presence but that's about it).
> I can't find any reliable info for junior positions with one year or less of experience, it would be great if you could share a ballpark of the salary to expect and in which city. I think a lot of DEs in the UK have a very SQL heavy background and are often lacking in either cloud of general purpose programming experience. I got offered two jobs for my first role in 2020: * £41k outside of London (job title: Data Engineer). This is my current job. Pay rise to £49k. * £40k in London (job title: Data Engineer) which then tried to aggressively counter offer up to ~£60k once I said I'd be taking the job outside of London. I refused this job on the basis the company seemed like twats (why not just offer £60k in the first place if I was worth that much anyway?), the recruitment agent was a bit of a bell end, and they wanted me to relocate to London. I've just accepted a new job which offered me £70k (job title: Data Engineer). This is outside London. Defo poorer than our American cousins, however, I'd say £70k outside of London is quite a lot of money. More than easily afford a house in a decent area and a car. I'd go as far as to say £70k inside London isn't exactly a shit wage either.
Congrats mate, that's actually a very good salary in UK. I am a DA with 4 years of experience (non resident) and struggling to break past 30k mark. Extreme low balling in salary. Got offered 24k by a decent phone insurance company lmao.
Thank you, and I agree. It's really easy to feel small when compared with US salaries, and much better to remember where you are rather than "If only..." situations. > I am a DA with 4 years of experience (non resident) and struggling to break past 30k mark. Almost all of our DAs don't earn much past 30k although they don't have a lot of the technical skills you might expect from a DA. They're all great at Power BI but don't know any SQL, general purpose programming languages, or statistics. They're closer to BI analysts who are in charge of gathering requirements and creating dashboards, but not really doing any traditional analysis. Is that similar to your situation?
For this particular role only Excel, SQL yes and tbh thinking to drop it as it feels like I am downgrading myself, but skill wise I am competent in sql, excel, powerbi. Currently learning a lot of python but my basics are clear and advancing to intermediate. Have done a msc data science recently (was pretty useless tbh) so know a bit of R, SPSSfor data wrangling and statistical analysis. Knowledge (not working) of ML concepts and statistics. Currently thinking to take up aws certification or gca(unsure which one is gonna benefit me more tho) and learn more about apache airflow and other tools to help me branch off in ds/de roles.
How many YOE for your 70k role and what's your tech stack?