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 18 September 2025.

The table below provides contractor rate benchmarking and summary statistics, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 111 125 79
Rank change year-on-year +14 -46 +63
Contract jobs requiring a DevOps Engineer 51 57 144
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the South East 1.46% 1.23% 2.59%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.62% 1.33% 2.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 41 49 123
10th Percentile £380 £443 £463
25th Percentile £413 £513 £516
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £575 £600
Median % change year-on-year -21.74% -4.17% -
75th Percentile £538 £638 £665
90th Percentile £603 £675 £748
England median daily rate £500 £563 £596
% change year-on-year -11.11% -5.66% -0.63%
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 £82.00 £74.00 £74.00
% change year-on-year +10.81% - +16.08%

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 3,142 4,271 5,267
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.08% 92.37% 94.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,034 2,548 3,570
10th Percentile £204 £245 £213
25th Percentile £363 £400 £381
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £513 £500
Median % change year-on-year -2.44% +2.50% -
75th Percentile £598 £625 £613
90th Percentile £650 £688 £700
England median daily rate £508 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -3.33% -4.55% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 278 317 246
10th Percentile £13.43 £16.00 £16.00
25th Percentile £15.50 £30.41 £21.01
Median hourly rate £25.15 £57.50 £50.71
Median % change year-on-year -56.26% +13.39% +111.29%
75th Percentile £57.50 £75.00 £66.25
90th Percentile £71.95 £80.00 £75.67
England median hourly rate £25.15 £46.18 £45.00
% change year-on-year -45.54% +2.62% +73.08%

DevOps Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in the South East

Job postings that featured DevOps Engineer in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in the South East.

Job vacancy trend for DevOps Engineer 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 18 September 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 18 September 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 +19 29 £425 -27.66% 12
Berkshire +18 25 £425 -26.09% 8
Hampshire +3 14 £450 -23.08% 6
East Sussex - 6 £450 - 1
Buckinghamshire +6 3 £600 -4.00% 1
Kent - 2 £569 - 2
Oxfordshire -5 1 £525 +16.67% 4
DevOps Engineer
England

DevOps Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the South East

For the 6 months to 18 September 2025, DevOps Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the South East region featuring DevOps Engineer in the job title.

1 51 (100.00%) DevOps
2 35 (68.63%) CI/CD
3 30 (58.82%) Kubernetes
4 25 (49.02%) Terraform
5 24 (47.06%) Infrastructure as Code
6 22 (43.14%) Azure
7 20 (39.22%) Python
8 18 (35.29%) SQL
8 18 (35.29%) Problem-Solving
9 17 (33.33%) AWS
10 16 (31.37%) Agile
11 14 (27.45%) Azure DevOps
11 14 (27.45%) Containerisation
11 14 (27.45%) Linux
11 14 (27.45%) IaaS
12 13 (25.49%) Ansible
12 13 (25.49%) Bash
12 13 (25.49%) Security Cleared
13 12 (23.53%) GitHub
13 12 (23.53%) ADO
13 12 (23.53%) Social Skills
13 12 (23.53%) Site Reliability Engineering
14 11 (21.57%) Azure Storage
14 11 (21.57%) Azure AKS
14 11 (21.57%) PaaS
14 11 (21.57%) Azure SQL Database
15 10 (19.61%) Grafana
16 9 (17.65%) Test Automation
17 8 (15.69%) SC Cleared
17 8 (15.69%) Docker

DevOps Engineer Skill Set
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the South East by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 2 (3.92%) Confluence
2 1 (1.96%) Apache Airflow
2 1 (1.96%) Apache Spark
Cloud Services
1 22 (43.14%) Azure
2 17 (33.33%) AWS
3 14 (27.45%) Azure DevOps
3 14 (27.45%) IaaS
4 12 (23.53%) GitHub
5 11 (21.57%) Azure AKS
5 11 (21.57%) Azure Storage
5 11 (21.57%) PaaS
6 8 (15.69%) Azure Data Factory
6 8 (15.69%) GCP
7 6 (11.76%) OpenShift
8 3 (5.88%) Azure Monitor
8 3 (5.88%) Azure Table
8 3 (5.88%) GitHub Actions
8 3 (5.88%) Google Kubernetes Engine
8 3 (5.88%) Microsoft 365
8 3 (5.88%) Power Automate
8 3 (5.88%) Power Platform
9 2 (3.92%) Amazon S3
9 2 (3.92%) CloudFront
Communications & Networking
1 7 (13.73%) Firewall
2 3 (5.88%) DNS
3 2 (3.92%) DHCP
3 2 (3.92%) SAN
3 2 (3.92%) SSL
4 1 (1.96%) 3GPP
4 1 (1.96%) 5G
4 1 (1.96%) HTTP
4 1 (1.96%) HTTPS
4 1 (1.96%) SSH
4 1 (1.96%) TCP/IP
4 1 (1.96%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 11 (21.57%) Azure SQL Database
2 7 (13.73%) NoSQL
3 6 (11.76%) PostgreSQL
4 5 (9.80%) Redis
5 3 (5.88%) Power BI
6 2 (3.92%) Amazon RDS
6 2 (3.92%) Elasticsearch
7 1 (1.96%) Big Data
7 1 (1.96%) Delta Lake
7 1 (1.96%) Hadoop
7 1 (1.96%) Metadata
7 1 (1.96%) MongoDB
7 1 (1.96%) Parquet
7 1 (1.96%) Relational Database
7 1 (1.96%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 6 (11.76%) JIRA
2 5 (9.80%) Git
2 5 (9.80%) Jenkins
3 4 (7.84%) GitLab
4 1 (1.96%) MLflow
4 1 (1.96%) Poetry
4 1 (1.96%) PyCharm
4 1 (1.96%) SonarQube
4 1 (1.96%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 12 (23.53%) Social Skills
2 5 (9.80%) Analytical Skills
3 2 (3.92%) Public Sector
3 2 (3.92%) Telecoms
4 1 (1.96%) Legal
4 1 (1.96%) Retail
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 12 (23.53%) ADO
2 7 (13.73%) Elastic Stack
2 7 (13.73%) Kafka
3 6 (11.76%) YAML
4 5 (9.80%) Keycloak
5 4 (7.84%) .NET
5 4 (7.84%) ARM Templates
6 3 (5.88%) .NET Core
7 2 (3.92%) CSS
7 2 (3.92%) HTML
7 2 (3.92%) Jinja
8 1 (1.96%) Apache Avro
8 1 (1.96%) Flask
8 1 (1.96%) JSON
8 1 (1.96%) Node.js
8 1 (1.96%) NumPy
8 1 (1.96%) Pandas
8 1 (1.96%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 2 (3.92%) Hybrid Cloud
1 2 (3.92%) Self-Motivation
2 1 (1.96%) Enterprise Software
2 1 (1.96%) Linux Command Line
2 1 (1.96%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 14 (27.45%) Linux
2 8 (15.69%) Windows
3 4 (7.84%) Windows 10
4 2 (3.92%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (1.96%) Ubuntu
5 1 (1.96%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 51 (100.00%) DevOps
2 35 (68.63%) CI/CD
3 24 (47.06%) Infrastructure as Code
4 18 (35.29%) Problem-Solving
5 16 (31.37%) Agile
6 14 (27.45%) Containerisation
7 12 (23.53%) Site Reliability Engineering
8 9 (17.65%) Test Automation
9 7 (13.73%) Infrastructure Automation
9 7 (13.73%) Platform Engineering
10 6 (11.76%) End-to-End Testing
10 6 (11.76%) Observability
10 6 (11.76%) Validation
11 5 (9.80%) High Availability
11 5 (9.80%) Incident Management
11 5 (9.80%) Load Testing
11 5 (9.80%) Performance Testing
11 5 (9.80%) Risk Analysis
11 5 (9.80%) Scrum
11 5 (9.80%) Test Scripting
Programming Languages
1 20 (39.22%) Python
2 18 (35.29%) SQL
3 13 (25.49%) Bash
4 7 (13.73%) PowerShell
5 3 (5.88%) Bicep
5 3 (5.88%) C#
6 2 (3.92%) Java
6 2 (3.92%) JavaScript
6 2 (3.92%) Kotlin
6 2 (3.92%) Shell Script
7 1 (1.96%) Go
7 1 (1.96%) Groovy
7 1 (1.96%) Korn
Qualifications
1 13 (25.49%) Security Cleared
2 8 (15.69%) SC Cleared
3 7 (13.73%) AWS Certification
4 5 (9.80%) Azure Certification
5 4 (7.84%) DV Cleared
6 3 (5.88%) CCNA
6 3 (5.88%) Cisco Certification
6 3 (5.88%) Microsoft Certification
6 3 (5.88%) Network+ Certification
7 1 (1.96%) CCNP
7 1 (1.96%) JNCIP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 7 (13.73%) QA
2 2 (3.92%) SLA
3 1 (1.96%) GDPR
3 1 (1.96%) HIPAA
3 1 (1.96%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 1 (1.96%) NIST
3 1 (1.96%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 8 (15.69%) Docker
2 5 (9.80%) Active Directory
3 3 (5.88%) VMware Infrastructure
4 2 (3.92%) DFS Replication
4 2 (3.92%) vSphere
5 1 (1.96%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 30 (58.82%) Kubernetes
2 25 (49.02%) Terraform
3 13 (25.49%) Ansible
4 10 (19.61%) Grafana
5 8 (15.69%) Prometheus
6 5 (9.80%) Packer
7 2 (3.92%) logstash
7 2 (3.92%) Single Sign-On
8 1 (1.96%) Argo
8 1 (1.96%) Istio
8 1 (1.96%) Podman
8 1 (1.96%) Rancher
8 1 (1.96%) Rsyslog
8 1 (1.96%) SCOM
Vendors
1 8 (15.69%) Red Hat
2 6 (11.76%) Microsoft
3 5 (9.80%) Splunk
4 3 (5.88%) Google
4 3 (5.88%) VMware
5 2 (3.92%) Oracle
6 1 (1.96%) Ab Initio
6 1 (1.96%) Cloudera
6 1 (1.96%) Databricks
6 1 (1.96%) Ericsson
6 1 (1.96%) Salesforce
6 1 (1.96%) ServiceNow
6 1 (1.96%) UiPath