Scotland holds only 72 career records matching Product Development Engineer, and three of those are already on your own headcount.

The pool that can do this job in Scotland is narrow enough that every mis-timed or misdirected approach costs you a measurable share of the addressable market. This note sets out where the talent sits, how quickly it moves, and what the movement patterns tell you about realistic sourcing targets.

What your market actually looks like

The most revealing number is not the pool size but the employer concentration: Terumo Aortic in Inchinnan holds ten of the 72 records — roughly one in seven of everyone in Scotland who carries this capability. That single site is not an adjacent competitor in the conventional sense; it is structurally the dominant reservoir of the skill. Emblation, with three records, matches your own current headcount. The implication is that the market is not distributed evenly across Scotland; it is anchored around a small number of specialist medtech and engineering employers, and Terumo Aortic's footprint dwarfs every other single source.

When these people move

Across 312 completed roles in this pool, the median tenure before a move is 1.9 years. That is short — shorter than most engineering disciplines — and it tells you that individuals in this specialism do not wait for a life event to prompt a change; they move at roughly two-year intervals as a matter of career pattern. Layered on top of that, 33 of the 72 people moved into their current role within the last 18 months. Those 33 have almost certainly not yet reached the 1.9-year median; they are statistically unlikely to be looking right now. The actionable consequence is that your most receptive conversations are with the remaining pool members who are beyond the 1.9-year mark in their current role — not the recent arrivals.

Who holds this capability

Six named employers account for the identifiable concentration of this capability in Scotland. Terumo Aortic carries ten records, FlexMedical Solutions and Emblation each carry three, DwyerOmega and Chemring Energetics UK Ltd each carry two, and Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult carries two. Beyond those six, the remaining records are distributed across employers too thinly to appear as named clusters. The presence of Chemring and the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult in the list is notable: those are not medtech organisations, which means a portion of this capability has been built in defence and energy contexts and has not yet crossed into medical device development — a segment of the pool that may be open to a sector move.

Where people actually go

The observed employer-to-employer moves show a clear feeder chain rather than random circulation. Two people moved from Nailey into Terumo Aortic, and two moved from Jaguar Land Rover into Nailey — so automotive engineering feeds Nailey, and Nailey feeds Terumo Aortic. Separately, two people moved from Invent Design Build into DwyerOmega, and two moved from Greengage AgriTech into Invent Design Build. That second chain runs through agri-tech and a design consultancy into an instrumentation business. Neither chain has an observed outflow directly to FlexMedical Solutions in the data, which means your realistic recruitment sources are the organisations one step upstream of where this talent currently sits: Nailey, Invent Design Build, and the automotive and agri-tech employers that seed those businesses, rather than approaching Terumo Aortic head-on where tenure may still be recent.

Where the pool is

Glasgow and Edinburgh each account for 12 records, Aberdeen and the Greater Aberdeen Area together account for 14, and Inchinnan accounts for 6 — where Terumo Aortic is based. Your registered office is in Edinburgh EH2, which puts you within straightforward commuting range of both the Edinburgh cluster (12) and the Glasgow and Inchinnan clusters (18 combined) given that Inchinnan is less than an hour from the city centre. The Aberdeen concentration of 14 is the outlier: those individuals are unlikely to commute, so any approach into that group requires a relocation conversation or a remote-working proposition from the outset. Alness, where one pool member is currently based, sits north of Inverness and represents an even more significant geography to manage.

What the market pays

No published pay series covers this occupation in Scotland. There is no dated benchmark in the available data for Product Development Engineers at any level, and inventing one would be misleading. What the movement data does tell you indirectly is that people in this specialism change roles at a median of 1.9 years — a cadence that typically reflects a market where individuals use moves to achieve pay progression that does not come through annual review cycles. Your offer needs to be constructed with that dynamic in mind, and we would recommend a direct conversation with candidates to establish current package before any figure is put forward.

A sample, anonymised

Real career records. Names and profile links are withheld here; they are released with the full read.

The approach

With a pool of 72 and 33 already settled into roles taken within the last 18 months, the productive universe for an immediate approach is no more than 39 people — and within that, the priority targets are those whose tenure now exceeds 1.9 years and who sit in the Glasgow, Edinburgh, or Inchinnan geography. We would map those individuals directly against the movement chains identified above, prioritise those with a Nailey or Invent Design Build background given the established flow patterns, and open cold conversations by reference to the specialism rather than the role title, which is narrow enough to be identifiable in a small market. The twelve sample records above illustrate the range of seniority and geography across the pool and are available for direct discussion.