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    Why tech hiring in the UK is a struggle, and how CEE talent can close the gap

    Between depleted tech talent pools and increased demand for specific roles, IT hiring in the UK has become a challenge. But where domestic sourcing falls short, CEE tech nearshoring comes to the rescue.

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    The UK tech sector is facing its worst talent drought in 15 years. The shortage has reached critical levels, and it's not letting up.

    For UK businesses, the symptoms are familiar: roles sit open for months, project timelines slip, and the few qualified candidates they find often have multiple offers in hand. The causes run deeper than a simple supply-demand mismatch.

    Today's biggest hiring challenges, such as AI skills gaps, junior talent aversion, and the hunt for battle-tested experts, all point to a fundamental shift in what the market needs versus what it can deliver.

    The good news: Central and Eastern Europe continues to offer a proven solution. CEE talent combines technical depth, cost efficiency, and cultural fit, which can help UK businesses scale fast without compromising quality. Here's how it works.

    Focus on AI/ML specialists 

    How many AI prompts have you typed since this morning?
     
    For most professionals, it's already part of the daily workflow. But beyond the browser tab, AI is doing the heavy lifting: forecasting energy demand for utilities, optimizing production lines in manufacturing, flagging fraudulent transactions in real time, and modelling portfolio risk for insurers.
     
    Even without proven ROI, 85% of companies increased AI investments in 2025, and 91% plan to do the same in 2026. In Europe, AI job postings grew nearly sixfold compared to the prior year. Our reality is massively AI-driven. Yet UK companies are struggling to keep pace.
     
    A 2025 government-commissioned report exposed a critical AI skills gap across British businesses. Nearly every company surveyed reported shortages in at least one AI discipline, with over half citing technical skills as the primary bottleneck − not soft skills or business acumen, but core engineering capability.
     
    Universities are trying to close the gap, but the lag between academic training and production-ready skills remains vast. And here's the real risk: by the time UK graduates gain practical experience, competitors in the US, China, and the EU will have already shipped products, captured market share, and moved on to the next iteration. With AI complexity increasing and recruitment timelines stretching longer, UK organizations can't afford to wait years for the domestic talent pipeline to catch up.

    How does CEE help?

    Decades of STEM investment, strong outsourcing infrastructure, and deep programming traditions have made Central and Eastern Europe a go-to source for AI and ML talent. Countries such as Poland, Bulgaria, and Ukraine offer large pools of engineers with rigorous technical training, hands-on experience, and significantly lower employer costs than the UK market.

    Ukraine particularly stands out as one of the most competitive destinations for AI/ML talent sourcing. With 243 AI-focused companies, it ranks second only to Poland in Eastern Europe (an excellent choice if you need to scale multifunctional AI teams quickly). Total employment costs amplify the advantage: mid-level AI/ML engineers start around £2,700/month, while senior specialists average £4,300. In the UK, Glassdoor pegs mid-level ML engineers at ~£5,600, with London-based roles commanding a 15-30% premium, plus another 20-40% in tax and benefit costs on top. 
    Learn more from our 2026 CEE Tech Salary Guide

    Insider CEE market update: Ukraine


    We've noticed a surge in hiring in the Ukrainian tech industry, especially in high-demand roles.

    Salaries in Ukraine's IT sector remain stable. The market is shifting toward optimization, with clients increasingly seeking versatile professionals who can cover multiple roles.

    Hiring is accelerating: the second half of 2025 saw 41,000 job openings – an 11% increase over the first half. Miltech roles offering reservation benefits are seeing particularly strong growth, with over 700 openings in December.
    Roles that remain in the highest demand are ML/AI specialists, Data Engineers, Data Scientists, SREs, DevOps, and Cloud Engineers. Embedded and Hardware engineers are also surging, driven primarily by the miltech sector.

    Aversion towards hiring juniors

    If 2022 was the year of layoffs, 2025 swung harder – and UK tech took it full force. Following severe employer tax increases, structural restructuring, and AI-fuelled shifts, thousands of corporate workers were let go. Some moves proved premature, leaving organizations now scrambling to rebuild capabilities they recently cut.

    At the same time, budgets remain tight. Hiring managers, many still recovering from restructuring, are walking a tightrope, unwilling to risk their seats on a misjudged hire. The safest path? Prioritize proven experience. Senior or specialized professionals who can deliver immediate results now trump juniors who need onboarding, training, and closer supervision.

    The problem compounds: entry-level roles built on repetitive operational tasks are most exposed to automation and replacement by AI. In administrative, support, and routine development work, AI is already absorbing chunks of the workload, pushing some companies to cut junior hiring even further. Short-term logic, long-term risk. Without a steady junior intake, the pipeline of future senior specialists inevitably narrows.

    This risk-averse mindset has already translated into fewer entry-level opportunities, tighter hiring criteria, and fiercer competition for experienced candidates. The UK's pipeline of future tech talent sits at its lowest point in years: in 2025, job openings for programming roles declined 68% compared to 2019. 

    How does CEE help?

    Central and Eastern Europe offers UK organizations a way to rebuild junior- and mid-level talent pipelines without bearing the full cost and risk typically associated with entry-level hiring.

    Poland provides a fine example. As one of the region's most mature tech markets, local demand concentrates heavily on mid- and senior-level professionals. Combined with recent layoffs, this has expanded the pool of available junior and lower-mid-level candidates, particularly in major hubs like Warsaw, Kraków, and Wrocław.

    At the same time, strong educational institutions continue producing highly skilled graduates, while salary ranges remain moderate. Total employer costs for junior software engineers typically sit between £2,200 and £3,200 per month (£5,800 to £6,500 for senior roles). Junior data engineers stay within a similar range, while entry-level cybersecurity experts average £2,900 to £3,700 per month (£6,600 to £7,000 and £6,100 to £6,500 for senior experts, respectively).

    These costs let companies invest in structured early-career hiring, build succession pathways, and scale teams more sustainably.

    Learn more from our 2026 CEE Tech Salary Guide

    Insider CEE market update: Poland


    The Polish IT market remains generally stable, but hiring has become more selective.

    Manual testers are seeing renewed demand compared to previous periods. Hourly-rate contract roles, especially at mid-level, are growing as companies prioritize flexibility, cost optimization, and project-based teams over long-term commitments. 

     Demand for IT experts mirrors global trends: AI/ML, Data, Cloud, DevOps, and Cybersecurity roles (driven by regulatory pressure and rising cyber threats) are on the rise. Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, and Go are gaining importance, especially for scalable systems.
    Poland has also introduced noteworthy regulatory updates. Pay transparency is now mandatory, so employers must disclose specific salary ranges (including bonuses and benefits) early in the recruitment process. They can no longer ask candidates about their previous compensation to support fairer negotiations.

    Need for experts

    The junior uptake may have slowed, but UK organizations are hunting relentlessly for experts, especially in niche technologies. Hiring seasoned professionals who know their domain inside out, carry enterprise experience, and can hit the ground running is risk mitigation, albeit expensive.

    Salary ranges sit at the core of why hiring experts isn't straightforward, alongside limited availability. When the UK already faces a persistent talent shortage for senior and expert-level software engineers, the stakes multiply for sourcing top-tier professionals.

    Median salaries for senior software engineers reached £70,000 in 2025, the highest in Europe, making it harder to find suitable candidates in an already competitive, depleted pool.

    Employers are trying to combat the challenge through internal promotions. Currently, the UK has the highest promotion rate in Western Europe at 4.6%. But this approach has limits: salaries increase with seniority, and with companies reluctant to hire juniors, the pool of candidates for promotion will steadily decline.

    Beyond that, while the institutional knowledge, loyalty, and cultural continuity that come with internal promotion are valuable, every healthy organization needs fresh blood in senior roles as well. Bringing in external senior specialists injects new perspectives, broader experience across different markets and technologies, and avoids the internal baggage and emotional politics that often accompany long-term employees climbing the ranks.

    How does CEE help?

    As UK hiring grows more competitive and costly, CEE gives employers access to a mature, highly skilled workforce with strong engineering expertise, extensive international project experience, and proven ability to operate in distributed teams.

    Bulgaria exemplifies this. With a simple tax system, 10% personal income tax rate, and a large talent pool, it's ideal for hiring mid- and senior-level tech specialists. Employer costs are competitive: £3,100 to £5,100 for mid-level software engineers; £5,100 to £6,300 for senior software engineers; £6,800 to £7,800 for expert ML and AI specialists; and £6,300 to £7,800 for top-tier IT architects.

    Compare that with UK ranges from Glassdoor: mid-level engineers command £3,750–£5,417 per month (at least £1,000 more in London); senior engineers earn £5,000–£7,083+ per month; expert ML/AI specialists command £6,667–£10,000 per month; expert architect roles start at £7,500 per month. Add 20-25% on top for NIC, pension contributions, benefits, and other costs.

    Learn more from our 2026 CEE Tech Salary Guide

    Insider CEE market update: Bulgaria


    We don’t expect any significant changes in tech salaries in the Bulgarian tech market in 2026.

    The only outlier: .NET engineers. Demand has risen, and salary ranges are following suit.

    Starting this year, employers must legally disclose specific salary ranges at the job advertisement or recruitment stage.

    This applies not only to base salary but also to bonuses, allowances, and benefits, aiming to increase transparency and reduce pay discrimination.

    Long time-to-fill

    All these trends lead to another: hiring tech talent in the UK is taking longer.

    The average time-to-fill for a tech role is 56 days, or around 8 weeks from sourcing and screening, through recruitment, to the candidate accepting the offer. But that’s only part of the timeline. Notice periods in the UK typically range from 1 to 3 months, and for senior experts and management roles, you should expect the higher end.

    In practice, it takes 12–20 weeks on average from publishing a job to having a new hire ready to contribute. That’s difficult enough if you have the manpower to redistribute devs between projects while you wait. It’s much worse when delivery depends on new hires, but it’s due weeks before the new talent is ready to contribute.

    Beyond disrupted roadmaps, lagging recruitment has a range of other consequences. Research shows that half of UK employers lose good candidates due to lengthy hiring. For 59%, it takes too long to assess and recruit applicants when building a strong talent pool. As a result, long time-to-fill causes harm to your growth, preventing you from getting talent not just when you need it now, but also when you need it to scale.

    How does CEE help?

    With their large tech talent pools, countries such as Ukraine, Poland, and Bulgaria offer a convenient way to fill team gaps. Strong technical education systems and years of experience delivering for international clients mean UK companies can access skilled engineers at any seniority level, ready to contribute quickly, without lengthy onboarding cycles.

    In addition, the region has a mature ecosystem of companies specialized in tech talent outsourcing and staff augmentation. Deep knowledge of local recruitment markets and pre-vetted internal talent pools allow staff augmentation vendors to present qualified candidates significantly faster than traditional hiring processes. At Nortal, for example, it takes an average of 4–8 weeks to get the new hire from the CEE started. As a result, UK firms shorten time-to-fill, reduce hiring risk, and scale teams predictably.

    Learn more from our 2026 CEE Tech Salary Guide

    What this means for UK companies

    The numbers tell a clear story. A senior ML engineer in London costs roughly £7,000/month base salary, plus another £1,750 in employer costs, totaling £8,750. That same role in Ukraine runs £4,300 all-in. Over a year, that's a £53,400 difference per engineer. Scale that across a team of five, and you're looking at £267,000 in annual savings, enough to fund an additional three mid-level engineers or reinvest in product development.

    But cost is only part of the equation; speed is the other half. When a critical AI role sits open for six months in the UK, competitors aren't waiting. They're shipping features, capturing users, and building moats. CEE hiring timelines typically take 4–8 weeks from brief to onboarding an engineer. That velocity difference compounds quickly.

    For organizations serious about AI transformation, junior talent development, or scaling senior capability without blowing budgets, the question isn't whether to look at CEE. It's which countries, which roles, and how quickly you can move.

    IT Salary Guide_2026_Mockup_2_BG

     

    CEE IT Salaries Guide 2026

     

    Fill the gaps. Scale with confidence.

    We work with UK companies from candidate sourcing through onboarding and ongoing management to build dedicated tech teams that slot into your workflows, ramp up without friction, and start shipping within weeks.

    Start with the data: download our 2026 CEE Tech Salary Guide for country-by-country breakdowns of pay ranges, role availability, and regulatory considerations.

     

    Get it now

    Fill the gaps. Scale with confidence

    We work with UK companies from candidate sourcing through onboarding and ongoing management to build dedicated tech teams that slot into your workflows, ramp up without friction, and start shipping within weeks.

    Start with the data: download our 2026 CEE Tech Salary Guide for country-by-country breakdowns of pay ranges, role availability, and regulatory considerations.

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    FAQ

     

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