The UK Data Job Market — Role Archetypes

17 role archetypes discovered from job-title embeddings (MiniLM → UMAP → HDBSCAN), ranked by salary.

AI/ML Engineer is the ceiling — £74,416
£14.4K above mid-level Data Scientist. The "AI premium" is real and quantifiable.
"Senior" is salary-neutral for Data Scientists
Senior DS £59,723 vs mid-level DS £60,000. The jump happens at Lead/Principal (£65K), not at "Senior".
The £45K non-specialist analyst floor
Generic "Data Analyst" and "Business Data Analyst" both cluster at exactly £45,000.
Analytics Engineer (£61,822) outpays Data Scientist
Contradicts the popular narrative that data science is the highest-paying data career.

Median salary by role archetype

Bars show median salary; hover for posting count and interquartile range. Grey = unclustered noise.

The role landscape (UMAP)

Each point is one of 2,835 postings, positioned by job-title embedding and coloured by archetype. Tight, separated blobs = clean clusters.

All archetypes

Click a column header to sort. % Real = share of postings with an employer-published salary (vs Adzuna estimate).

# Archetype Postings Median IQR (p25–p75) % Real Most common title