DevOps Engineer Contract Job Trends in the South East

Development Operations Engineer
England > South East

The median Development Operations Engineer daily rate in the South East is £450, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 25 November 2025.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
25 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 122 116 80
Rank change year-on-year -6 -36 +48
Contract jobs requiring a DevOps Engineer 55 58 143
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 1.35% 1.42% 2.70%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.50% 1.53% 2.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 45 49 118
10th Percentile £388 £495 £463
25th Percentile £413 £525 £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £585 £573
Median % change year-on-year -23.08% +2.18% -4.58%
75th Percentile £550 £653 £638
90th Percentile £597 £671 £738
England median daily rate £510 £575 £550
% change year-on-year -11.30% +4.55% -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile - - £62.63
Median hourly rate - - £67.27
75th Percentile - - £71.90
90th Percentile - - -
England median hourly rate - £74.00 £71.13
% change year-on-year - +4.03% +30.52%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
South East

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in the South East. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in the South East with a recognized job title 3,674 3,784 4,976
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.00% 92.84% 94.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,339 2,287 3,259
10th Percentile £209 £245 £206
25th Percentile £397 £400 £386
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £513 £510
Median % change year-on-year -2.44% +0.49% +2.00%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £613
90th Percentile £675 £688 £688
England median daily rate £507 £525 £534
% change year-on-year -3.43% -1.69% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 379 200 250
10th Percentile £13.75 £18.41 £16.00
25th Percentile £16.17 £26.00 £24.00
Median hourly rate £25.00 £57.38 £52.20
Median % change year-on-year -56.43% +9.91% +39.20%
75th Percentile £57.50 £72.36 £66.39
90th Percentile £81.00 £75.16 £76.53
England median hourly rate £25.15 £40.00 £45.88
% change year-on-year -37.13% -12.82% +41.17%

DevOps Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in the South East

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'DevOps Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East.

DevOps Engineer job vacancy trend in the South East

DevOps Engineer
Daily Rate Trend in the South East

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for DevOps Engineer job vacancies in the South East.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for DevOps Engineer job vacancies in the South East

DevOps Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram in the South East

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing DevOps Engineer in the South East over the 6 months to 25 November 2025.

Daily rate histogram for DevOps Engineer in the South East

DevOps Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend in the South East

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for DevOps Engineer job vacancies in the South East.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for DevOps Engineer job vacancies in the South East

DevOps Engineer
Contract Job Locations in the South East

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing DevOps Engineer within the South East region over the 6 months to 25 November 2025. The 'Rank Change' column provides an indication of the change in demand within each location based on the same 6 month period last year.

Location Rank Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Matching
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
Thames Valley -10 27 £425 -30.33% 8
Hampshire -2 24 £525 -8.70% 5
Berkshire -3 22 £425 -31.45% 2
Buckinghamshire -2 3 £575 -8.00% 2
East Sussex +4 2 £319 -44.57%
Oxfordshire -10 2 £525 +16.67% 4
Surrey +4 1 - - 4
Kent - 1 £569 -
DevOps Engineer
England

DevOps Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the South East

For the 6 months to 25 November 2025, DevOps Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the South East region featuring DevOps Engineer in the job title.

1 55 (100.00%) DevOps
2 38 (69.09%) CI/CD
3 26 (47.27%) Azure
3 26 (47.27%) Kubernetes
4 25 (45.45%) Agile
5 24 (43.64%) Python
5 24 (43.64%) Terraform
6 23 (41.82%) Security Cleared
7 21 (38.18%) Infrastructure as Code
8 20 (36.36%) Ansible
9 19 (34.55%) Containerisation
9 19 (34.55%) GitHub
9 19 (34.55%) Problem-Solving
10 18 (32.73%) Bash
11 17 (30.91%) Linux
12 16 (29.09%) AWS
12 16 (29.09%) Azure DevOps
13 13 (23.64%) Docker
14 11 (20.00%) Platform Engineering
14 11 (20.00%) PowerShell
14 11 (20.00%) SC Cleared
14 11 (20.00%) Windows
15 10 (18.18%) DV Cleared
15 10 (18.18%) Grafana
15 10 (18.18%) Kafka
15 10 (18.18%) Observability
15 10 (18.18%) Red Hat
15 10 (18.18%) SQL
16 9 (16.36%) IaaS
16 9 (16.36%) Jenkins

DevOps Engineer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the South East 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 1 (1.82%) Apache Airflow
1 1 (1.82%) Apache Spark
1 1 (1.82%) Confluence
Cloud Services
1 26 (47.27%) Azure
2 19 (34.55%) GitHub
3 16 (29.09%) AWS
3 16 (29.09%) Azure DevOps
4 9 (16.36%) IaaS
5 8 (14.55%) Azure AKS
5 8 (14.55%) GitHub Actions
5 8 (14.55%) OpenShift
5 8 (14.55%) PaaS
6 7 (12.73%) GCP
6 7 (12.73%) Serverless
7 6 (10.91%) Azure Functions
8 5 (9.09%) Azure Data Factory
8 5 (9.09%) Azure Storage
8 5 (9.09%) Entra ID
9 3 (5.45%) Amazon EKS
9 3 (5.45%) Azure API Management
9 3 (5.45%) Azure Monitor
10 2 (3.64%) Amazon ECS
10 2 (3.64%) Google Kubernetes Engine
Communications & Networking
1 7 (12.73%) Firewall
2 4 (7.27%) SSL
3 3 (5.45%) DNS
4 2 (3.64%) VPN
5 1 (1.82%) 3GPP
5 1 (1.82%) 5G
5 1 (1.82%) DHCP
5 1 (1.82%) HTTPS
5 1 (1.82%) Network Security
5 1 (1.82%) SAN
5 1 (1.82%) SSH
5 1 (1.82%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 8 (14.55%) PostgreSQL
2 7 (12.73%) Redis
3 5 (9.09%) Azure SQL Database
3 5 (9.09%) NoSQL
4 2 (3.64%) Elasticsearch
5 1 (1.82%) Amazon RDS
5 1 (1.82%) Big Data
5 1 (1.82%) Delta Lake
5 1 (1.82%) Hadoop
5 1 (1.82%) Metadata
5 1 (1.82%) MongoDB
5 1 (1.82%) Parquet
5 1 (1.82%) Relational Database
5 1 (1.82%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 9 (16.36%) Jenkins
2 8 (14.55%) Git
3 4 (7.27%) GitLab
4 3 (5.45%) JIRA
5 1 (1.82%) MLflow
5 1 (1.82%) Poetry
5 1 (1.82%) PyCharm
5 1 (1.82%) SonarQube
5 1 (1.82%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 13 (23.64%) Social Skills
2 7 (12.73%) Analytical Skills
2 7 (12.73%) Public Sector
3 3 (5.45%) Billing
4 2 (3.64%) Retail
4 2 (3.64%) Telecoms
5 1 (1.82%) Documentation Skills
5 1 (1.82%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 1 (1.82%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 10 (18.18%) Kafka
2 8 (14.55%) Elastic Stack
3 7 (12.73%) Keycloak
3 7 (12.73%) YAML
4 6 (10.91%) ADO
5 5 (9.09%) .NET
5 5 (9.09%) .NET Core
5 5 (9.09%) GraphQL
5 5 (9.09%) REST
6 3 (5.45%) ARM Templates
6 3 (5.45%) OAuth
6 3 (5.45%) OAuth2
6 3 (5.45%) OpenID
6 3 (5.45%) SAML
7 2 (3.64%) .NET Framework
7 2 (3.64%) ASP.NET
7 2 (3.64%) CSS
7 2 (3.64%) HTML
7 2 (3.64%) Jinja
7 2 (3.64%) Microsoft Graph
Miscellaneous
1 4 (7.27%) Linux Command Line
2 2 (3.64%) Hybrid Cloud
2 2 (3.64%) Public Cloud
3 1 (1.82%) Cloud Native
3 1 (1.82%) Enterprise Software
3 1 (1.82%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 17 (30.91%) Linux
2 11 (20.00%) Windows
3 8 (14.55%) Windows 10
4 2 (3.64%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (1.82%) Ubuntu
5 1 (1.82%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 55 (100.00%) DevOps
2 38 (69.09%) CI/CD
3 25 (45.45%) Agile
4 21 (38.18%) Infrastructure as Code
5 19 (34.55%) Containerisation
5 19 (34.55%) Problem-Solving
6 11 (20.00%) Platform Engineering
7 10 (18.18%) Observability
8 9 (16.36%) Test Automation
9 8 (14.55%) Infrastructure Automation
10 7 (12.73%) DevSecOps
10 7 (12.73%) RBAC
10 7 (12.73%) Site Reliability Engineering
11 6 (10.91%) AI
11 6 (10.91%) Immutable Infrastructure
11 6 (10.91%) Scrum
11 6 (10.91%) Validation
12 5 (9.09%) Analytical Thinking
12 5 (9.09%) Identity Management
12 5 (9.09%) Project Management
Programming Languages
1 24 (43.64%) Python
2 18 (32.73%) Bash
3 11 (20.00%) PowerShell
4 10 (18.18%) SQL
5 7 (12.73%) JavaScript
6 5 (9.09%) C#
6 5 (9.09%) Java
6 5 (9.09%) PHP
7 2 (3.64%) Kotlin
7 2 (3.64%) Shell Script
8 1 (1.82%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 23 (41.82%) Security Cleared
2 11 (20.00%) SC Cleared
3 10 (18.18%) DV Cleared
4 5 (9.09%) AWS Certification
5 3 (5.45%) CCNA
5 3 (5.45%) Cisco Certification
5 3 (5.45%) Network+ Certification
6 2 (3.64%) Azure Certification
7 1 (1.82%) CCNP
7 1 (1.82%) JNCIP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (9.09%) QA
2 3 (5.45%) Data Quality
3 1 (1.82%) GDPR
3 1 (1.82%) HIPAA
3 1 (1.82%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 1 (1.82%) NCSC
3 1 (1.82%) NIST
3 1 (1.82%) PCI DSS
3 1 (1.82%) SLA
System Software
1 13 (23.64%) Docker
2 6 (10.91%) Active Directory
3 2 (3.64%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (1.82%) DFS Replication
4 1 (1.82%) VMware Infrastructure
4 1 (1.82%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 26 (47.27%) Kubernetes
2 24 (43.64%) Terraform
3 20 (36.36%) Ansible
4 10 (18.18%) Grafana
5 8 (14.55%) Prometheus
6 6 (10.91%) Packer
7 3 (5.45%) Puppet
8 2 (3.64%) Argo
8 2 (3.64%) Istio
8 2 (3.64%) logstash
8 2 (3.64%) Podman
8 2 (3.64%) Progress Chef
8 2 (3.64%) Single Sign-On
9 1 (1.82%) linkerd
9 1 (1.82%) Proxmox
9 1 (1.82%) Rsyslog
9 1 (1.82%) SCOM
Vendors
1 10 (18.18%) Red Hat
2 8 (14.55%) Splunk
3 4 (7.27%) Microsoft
4 3 (5.45%) Google
4 3 (5.45%) VMware
5 2 (3.64%) Oracle
6 1 (1.82%) Cloudera
6 1 (1.82%) Databricks
6 1 (1.82%) Ericsson
6 1 (1.82%) Salesforce
6 1 (1.82%) UiPath
6 1 (1.82%) Zscaler