UK AI job market surges as firms hunt for context engineers

In 2025, technology recruitment firm SPG Resourcing reported that UK job listings for AI prompt engineers rose 180% compared with the previous year. A separate analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) showed a 61% increase in specialist AI roles over the same period. The growth reflects a shift from pure prompt‑engineering to a broader skill set known as “context engineering,” where professionals design the surrounding data, policies, code and system constraints that AI agents rely on. Companies building AI agents, retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) systems and AI‑enabled workflows need this expertise to ensure models have the right context and avoid errors.

Context engineering is described as the practice of supplying the model with relevant customer records, product histories, code bases, tests and deployment parameters, rather than only crafting the prompt. As AI agents become capable of calling tools, querying business systems and maintaining state, the quality of their output increasingly depends on the quality of the context they receive.