Demand for developers and engineers with blockchain skills has risen 517% over the last 12 months, a survey of almost 100,000 developers has found.
Moreover, the salaries offered for blockchain engineering roles are among the highest for developers in London, averaging $89,000 per annum (approximately £68,000). This is second only to embedded engineers, who earn an average of $90,000 (£71,000).
Demand for engineers with security expertise grew the second quickest during 2018, rising by 132%, likely due to the rising number of data breaches and public data privacy concerns, according to recruitment firm Hired.
The company released its annual report into the state of software engineers today, examining how the demand for developers has changed in 13 major cities including London, San Francisco, and Toronto during 2018.
The findings were collated and analysed after interviews with more than 98,000 developers.
The average salary for embedded engineers was also used as a point of comparison against the UK average for all sectors, with Hired finding these workers earn 145% more than the UK average of 29,000.
This is despite the fact UK-based developers earn far less than their US counterparts, with San Francisco-based blockchain engineers, for example, earning 66% more on average, or 118,000 per year.
"Empowering tech talent with data that helps them understand their market worth and reveals hiring trends will help them have a more seamless job search experience," said Hired CEO Mehul Patel.
"We hope this insight will fuel thoughtful career conversations among the developer community and provide actionable data that will help software engineers reach their goals."
Among the report's findings were that one in five software engineers are self-taught coders, 21%, and that less than half, 46%, have a computer science degree.
When asked which technologies they were most interested in pursuing, the majority of respondents, 61%, listed machine learning as their first or second preference. User experience and blockchain came second and third, followed by mobile and hardware.
When asked about their ten-year goals, meanwhile, more than a third said they "just want to continue building cool things", 37%, while 23% of developers said they aimed to become a leader in the mould of a senior vice president or CTO. Around one in five, 19%, hold ambitions to start their own company.
The report also examined which programming languages were most commonly-used, with JavaScript topping the chart for the language most often used across the world, 62%, followed by Java and Python, both 42%, and HTML, 36%.
The most in-demand coding language in London, meanwhile, based on the number of interview requests granted during 2018, was Microsoft's TypeScript, as well as the languages Scala and Go.
