Kubernetes Contract Job Trends in Birmingham

Kubernetes (k8s)
West Midlands > Birmingham

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in Birmingham requiring Kubernetes skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 18 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 21 41 59
Rank change year-on-year +20 +18 -17
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 65 12 6
As % of all contract jobs in Birmingham 7.17% 2.28% 0.80%
As % of the Systems Management category 51.18% 21.05% 7.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 48 7 6
10th Percentile £391 £297 £238
25th Percentile £425 £366 £244
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £450 £350
Median % change year-on-year +11.11% +28.57% -50.00%
75th Percentile £565 £513 £491
90th Percentile £600 £643 £663
West Midlands median daily rate £515 £545 £500
% change year-on-year -5.43% +8.91% -23.08%

All Systems Management Skills
Birmingham

Kubernetes falls under the Systems Management category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring systems management skills in Birmingham.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for systems management skills 127 57 82
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in Birmingham 14.02% 10.82% 10.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 90 42 67
10th Percentile £325 £263 £223
25th Percentile £425 £331 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £459 £425
Median % change year-on-year +8.99% +7.94% -28.42%
75th Percentile £550 £589 £538
90th Percentile £600 £699 £650
West Midlands median daily rate £486 £477 £438
% change year-on-year +1.89% +9.03% -16.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 0 2
10th Percentile £31.25 - -
25th Percentile £38.66 - -
Median hourly rate £51.55 - £55.00
Median % change year-on-year - - +180.58%
75th Percentile £64.66 - -
90th Percentile £72.22 - -
West Midlands median hourly rate £64.07 £16.19 £55.00
% change year-on-year +295.72% -70.56% +203.70%

Kubernetes
Job Vacancy Trend in Birmingham

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Kubernetes relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in Birmingham.

Kubernetes job vacancy trend in Birmingham

Kubernetes
Daily Rate Trend in Birmingham

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in Birmingham citing Kubernetes.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in Birmingham citing Kubernetes

Kubernetes
Daily Rate Histogram in Birmingham

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Kubernetes in Birmingham over the 6 months to 18 April 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Kubernetes in Birmingham

Kubernetes
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in Birmingham by Category

The following tables expand on the one above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. They cover the same employment type, locality and period, with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each category:

Application Platforms
1 15 (23.08%) Confluence
2 9 (13.85%) OpenStack
3 2 (3.08%) SAS
4 1 (1.54%) Apache
4 1 (1.54%) WebLogic
Applications
1 1 (1.54%) Microsoft Project
Cloud Services
1 21 (32.31%) AWS
1 21 (32.31%) Azure
2 20 (30.77%) GitHub
3 18 (27.69%) GCP
4 15 (23.08%) OpenShift
5 14 (21.54%) GitHub Actions
6 3 (4.62%) Google Kubernetes Engine
7 2 (3.08%) Azure AKS
7 2 (3.08%) Azure DevOps
8 1 (1.54%) AWS CloudFormation
8 1 (1.54%) IaaS
8 1 (1.54%) PaaS
8 1 (1.54%) SaaS
8 1 (1.54%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 4 (6.15%) DNS
2 2 (3.08%) SSL
3 1 (1.54%) Fibre Channel
3 1 (1.54%) iSCSI
3 1 (1.54%) NAS
3 1 (1.54%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 18 (27.69%) Elasticsearch
1 18 (27.69%) PostgreSQL
2 1 (1.54%) Metadata
2 1 (1.54%) NoSQL
Development Applications
1 22 (33.85%) Jenkins
1 22 (33.85%) JIRA
2 17 (26.15%) Git
3 14 (21.54%) GitLab
3 14 (21.54%) Selenium
4 13 (20.00%) Cucumber
4 13 (20.00%) JMeter
4 13 (20.00%) JUnit
4 13 (20.00%) WebDriver
5 2 (3.08%) CircleCI
5 2 (3.08%) Liquibase
General
1 35 (53.85%) Social Skills
2 15 (23.08%) Analytical Skills
3 10 (15.38%) Finance
4 6 (9.23%) Organisational Skills
5 5 (7.69%) Banking
6 4 (6.15%) Public Sector
7 3 (4.62%) Telecoms
8 1 (1.54%) Documentation Skills
8 1 (1.54%) Financial Institution
8 1 (1.54%) Military
Job Titles
1 13 (20.00%) Senior
2 10 (15.38%) Tester
3 9 (13.85%) Site Reliability Engineer
3 9 (13.85%) Splunk Engineer
4 8 (12.31%) Automation Tester
4 8 (12.31%) DevOps Engineer
4 8 (12.31%) Site Engineer
5 7 (10.77%) Senior Automation Tester
5 7 (10.77%) Senior Tester
6 5 (7.69%) Architect
7 4 (6.15%) Cloud Engineer
7 4 (6.15%) Lead
7 4 (6.15%) SIEM Engineer
8 3 (4.62%) Automation Test Lead
8 3 (4.62%) Elasticsearch Engineer
8 3 (4.62%) GCP DevOps
8 3 (4.62%) GCP DevOps Engineer
8 3 (4.62%) GCP Engineer
8 3 (4.62%) Senior DevOps
8 3 (4.62%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 23 (35.38%) Elastic Stack
2 13 (20.00%) Spring
2 13 (20.00%) WireMock
3 12 (18.46%) OpenTelemetry
4 7 (10.77%) Kafka
5 4 (6.15%) REST
6 3 (4.62%) FastAPI
6 3 (4.62%) RabbitMQ
7 2 (3.08%) .NET
7 2 (3.08%) ARM Templates
7 2 (3.08%) Fluent Bit
8 1 (1.54%) ADO
8 1 (1.54%) Loki
8 1 (1.54%) Middleware
8 1 (1.54%) OpenCV
8 1 (1.54%) pytest
8 1 (1.54%) Regular Expression
8 1 (1.54%) RESTful
8 1 (1.54%) TensorFlow
8 1 (1.54%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 11 (16.92%) Distributed Systems
2 10 (15.38%) Distributed Architecture
3 8 (12.31%) Cloud Native
3 8 (12.31%) Management Information System
4 4 (6.15%) Hybrid Cloud
4 4 (6.15%) PKI
5 3 (4.62%) Distributed Applications
5 3 (4.62%) Onboarding
5 3 (4.62%) Product Ownership
6 2 (3.08%) CMDB
6 2 (3.08%) Public Cloud
6 2 (3.08%) Security Posture
7 1 (1.54%) Data Protection Act
7 1 (1.54%) Enterprise Storage
7 1 (1.54%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 14 (21.54%) Linux
2 9 (13.85%) Unix
3 6 (9.23%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 38 (58.46%) CI/CD
2 37 (56.92%) Containerisation
3 35 (53.85%) Observability
4 34 (52.31%) DevOps
5 24 (36.92%) Agile
6 22 (33.85%) Problem-Solving
6 22 (33.85%) Validation
7 21 (32.31%) Migration
8 19 (29.23%) Incident Response
9 16 (24.62%) Microservices
10 15 (23.08%) Change Management
10 15 (23.08%) Continuous Improvement
10 15 (23.08%) Test Automation
11 14 (21.54%) Test Strategy
12 13 (20.00%) BDD
12 13 (20.00%) Digital Transformation Programme
12 13 (20.00%) End-to-End Testing
12 13 (20.00%) Load Testing
12 13 (20.00%) TDD
13 12 (18.46%) Data Ingestion
Programming Languages
1 27 (41.54%) Python
2 14 (21.54%) Bash
3 6 (9.23%) Go
4 4 (6.15%) JavaScript
4 4 (6.15%) SQL
5 2 (3.08%) Bicep
5 2 (3.08%) Search Processing Language
6 1 (1.54%) Groovy
6 1 (1.54%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 19 (29.23%) Security Cleared
2 16 (24.62%) SC Cleared
3 13 (20.00%) Degree
4 11 (16.92%) Computer Science Degree
5 4 (6.15%) CISM
5 4 (6.15%) CISSP
6 3 (4.62%) Master's Degree
7 1 (1.54%) AWS Certification
7 1 (1.54%) AWS Certified Developer
7 1 (1.54%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
7 1 (1.54%) Azure Certification
7 1 (1.54%) PMI Certification
7 1 (1.54%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 3 (4.62%) QA
2 2 (3.08%) Data Quality
2 2 (3.08%) GDPR
2 2 (3.08%) PCI DSS
3 1 (1.54%) ISO/IEC 27001
System Software
1 40 (61.54%) Docker
2 3 (4.62%) VMware Infrastructure
2 3 (4.62%) VMware NSX
2 3 (4.62%) vSphere
3 2 (3.08%) etcd
4 1 (1.54%) NFS
4 1 (1.54%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 31 (47.69%) Grafana
2 27 (41.54%) Ansible
3 25 (38.46%) Prometheus
3 25 (38.46%) Terraform
4 17 (26.15%) Kibana
5 9 (13.85%) logstash
6 8 (12.31%) Puppet
7 7 (10.77%) Argo
8 3 (4.62%) Control-M
8 3 (4.62%) IBM Guardium
8 3 (4.62%) Nessus
8 3 (4.62%) vCenter Server
9 2 (3.08%) Fluentd
Vendors
1 18 (27.69%) Splunk
2 8 (12.31%) Microsoft
3 5 (7.69%) Red Hat
4 4 (6.15%) Pure Storage
4 4 (6.15%) VMware
5 3 (4.62%) Tenable
6 1 (1.54%) Brocade
6 1 (1.54%) Cisco
6 1 (1.54%) Dell
6 1 (1.54%) Dynatrace
6 1 (1.54%) Google
6 1 (1.54%) New Relic
6 1 (1.54%) Oracle