Kafka Contract Job Trends in the South East

Apache Kafka
England > South East

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the South East requiring Kafka skills. It covers vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 17 September 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 128 134 182
Rank change year-on-year +6 +48 -21
Contract jobs citing Kafka 33 50 32
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the South East 0.95% 1.09% 0.57%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 5.56% 7.02% 3.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 29 27 23
10th Percentile £285 £352 £450
25th Percentile £368 £394 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £435 £450 £600
Median % change year-on-year -3.33% -25.00% +1.48%
75th Percentile £525 £492 £700
90th Percentile £600 £535 £734
England median daily rate £550 £617 £675
% change year-on-year -10.90% -8.56% +5.47%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 5 0
Median hourly rate - £28.00 -
England median hourly rate £59.25 £28.00 £78.00
% change year-on-year +111.61% -64.10% +6.12%

All Software Libraries and Frameworks
South East

Kafka falls under the Software Libraries and Frameworks category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring technical specification, industry standards, software libraries and framework skills in the South East.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for technical specification, industry standards, software libraries and framework skills 593 712 853
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East 17.03% 15.51% 15.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 406 476 574
10th Percentile £289 £313 £313
25th Percentile £375 £411 £414
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -9.52% - -2.33%
75th Percentile £550 £620 £625
90th Percentile £625 £668 £700
England median daily rate £510 £550 £553
% change year-on-year -7.27% -0.45% -3.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 17 29 43
10th Percentile £24.69 £27.00 £50.00
25th Percentile - £56.65 £55.00
Median hourly rate £50.00 £61.60 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year -18.83% +2.67% -4.00%
75th Percentile £55.00 £70.00 £73.73
90th Percentile £58.75 £74.89 £76.53
England median hourly rate £54.85 £62.93 £61.25
% change year-on-year -12.84% +2.74% -2.26%

Kafka
Job Vacancy Trend in the South East

Job postings citing Kafka as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in the South East.

Job vacancy trend for Kafka in the South East

Kafka
Daily Rate Trend in the South East

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Kafka.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Kafka

Kafka
Daily Rate Histogram in the South East

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Kafka in the South East over the 6 months to 17 September 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Kafka in the South East

Kafka
Hourly Rate Trend in the South East

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Kafka.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Kafka

Kafka
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 Kafka within the South East region over the 6 months to 17 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 -5 13 £519 +9.21% 9
Berkshire +12 12 £519 +7.62% 8
Hampshire +19 11 £435 -5.95% 8
West Sussex -9 7 £283 -23.17% 3
Buckinghamshire -1 1 - -
Middlesex - 1 £635 -
Surrey - 1 £635 - 5
Kafka
England

Kafka
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 5 (15.15%) Apache Spark
2 1 (3.03%) Apache Airflow
2 1 (3.03%) CMS
Business Applications
1 3 (9.09%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 12 (36.36%) AWS
2 9 (27.27%) Serverless
3 8 (24.24%) AWS Lambda
3 8 (24.24%) GitHub
4 6 (18.18%) Azure
4 6 (18.18%) GCP
4 6 (18.18%) OpenShift
5 5 (15.15%) AWS CloudFormation
5 5 (15.15%) OCI
6 3 (9.09%) Amazon EMR
6 3 (9.09%) Amazon Kinesis
6 3 (9.09%) Amazon S3
6 3 (9.09%) Azure DevOps
6 3 (9.09%) Cloud Computing
6 3 (9.09%) GitHub Actions
6 3 (9.09%) Snowflake
7 2 (6.06%) Azure Data Factory
7 2 (6.06%) Google Kubernetes Engine
7 2 (6.06%) IaaS
7 2 (6.06%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 1 (3.03%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 14 (42.42%) PostgreSQL
2 9 (27.27%) NoSQL
3 8 (24.24%) Amazon Redshift
4 5 (15.15%) Amazon RDS
4 5 (15.15%) Couchbase
4 5 (15.15%) Redis
5 4 (12.12%) Big Data
5 4 (12.12%) Data Warehouse
6 2 (6.06%) Azure SQL Database
6 2 (6.06%) Data Lake
6 2 (6.06%) Elasticsearch
7 1 (3.03%) Data Vault
7 1 (3.03%) Delta Lake
7 1 (3.03%) Metadata
7 1 (3.03%) MySQL
7 1 (3.03%) Relational Database
7 1 (3.03%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 18 (54.55%) Jenkins
2 11 (33.33%) Git
3 7 (21.21%) JIRA
4 6 (18.18%) Subversion
5 1 (3.03%) Artifactory
5 1 (3.03%) Bitbucket
5 1 (3.03%) Cucumber
5 1 (3.03%) Gradle
5 1 (3.03%) JMeter
5 1 (3.03%) JUnit
5 1 (3.03%) Maven
5 1 (3.03%) Poetry
5 1 (3.03%) Pylint
5 1 (3.03%) SonarQube
5 1 (3.03%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 10 (30.30%) Social Skills
2 4 (12.12%) Analytical Skills
3 3 (9.09%) Banking
3 3 (9.09%) Presentation Skills
3 3 (9.09%) Telecoms
4 1 (3.03%) Automotive
4 1 (3.03%) Finance
4 1 (3.03%) Retail
Job Titles
1 9 (27.27%) Developer
2 8 (24.24%) Data Engineer
3 7 (21.21%) DevOps Engineer
3 7 (21.21%) Platform Engineer
4 6 (18.18%) Senior
5 5 (15.15%) Architect
6 3 (9.09%) Cloud Platform Engineer
6 3 (9.09%) Java Developer
6 3 (9.09%) Senior Data Engineer
6 3 (9.09%) Solutions Architect
7 2 (6.06%) AWS Architect
7 2 (6.06%) AWS Engineer
7 2 (6.06%) Cloud Engineer
7 2 (6.06%) Senior Cloud Engineer
7 2 (6.06%) Senior Platform Engineer
8 1 (3.03%) Cloud Architect
8 1 (3.03%) Data Scientist
8 1 (3.03%) Platform Architect
8 1 (3.03%) Senior Architect
8 1 (3.03%) Senior Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 7 (21.21%) GraphQL
1 7 (21.21%) gRPC
1 7 (21.21%) RabbitMQ
1 7 (21.21%) REST
2 5 (15.15%) Elastic Stack
2 5 (15.15%) Keycloak
2 5 (15.15%) YAML
3 2 (6.06%) Hibernate
3 2 (6.06%) Jinja
3 2 (6.06%) PySpark
3 2 (6.06%) Spring
4 1 (3.03%) JPA
4 1 (3.03%) NumPy
4 1 (3.03%) Pandas
4 1 (3.03%) pytest
4 1 (3.03%) PyTorch
4 1 (3.03%) React
4 1 (3.03%) RESTful
4 1 (3.03%) Spring Boot
4 1 (3.03%) Spring MVC
Miscellaneous
1 5 (15.15%) Replication
2 4 (12.12%) Cloud Native
2 4 (12.12%) Product Ownership
3 2 (6.06%) Distributed Architecture
3 2 (6.06%) Distributed Systems
4 1 (3.03%) CUDA
4 1 (3.03%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 16 (48.48%) Linux
2 5 (15.15%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 27 (81.82%) CI/CD
2 16 (48.48%) Agile
3 14 (42.42%) DevOps
4 13 (39.39%) Scrum
5 10 (30.30%) Infrastructure as Code
5 10 (30.30%) Platform Engineering
5 10 (30.30%) Problem-Solving
6 9 (27.27%) Containerisation
6 9 (27.27%) Microservices
6 9 (27.27%) Software Engineering
7 8 (24.24%) BDD
7 8 (24.24%) Computer Science
7 8 (24.24%) TDD
8 7 (21.21%) Continuous Integration
8 7 (21.21%) Data Engineering
8 7 (21.21%) Kanban
8 7 (21.21%) Observability
8 7 (21.21%) Scaled Agile Framework
9 6 (18.18%) Continuous Deployment
9 6 (18.18%) Data Integration
Programming Languages
1 14 (42.42%) Python
2 8 (24.24%) Java
3 7 (21.21%) Go
3 7 (21.21%) Shell Script
3 7 (21.21%) SQL
4 5 (15.15%) Bash
5 4 (12.12%) Scala
6 1 (3.03%) Bicep
6 1 (3.03%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 8 (24.24%) Computer Science Degree
1 8 (24.24%) Degree
2 5 (15.15%) AWS Certification
3 3 (9.09%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
4 1 (3.03%) SC Cleared
4 1 (3.03%) Security Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (12.12%) Data Quality
2 1 (3.03%) GDPR
2 1 (3.03%) QA
System Software
1 11 (33.33%) Docker
2 2 (6.06%) Active Directory
3 1 (3.03%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 14 (42.42%) Terraform
2 12 (36.36%) Kubernetes
3 9 (27.27%) Ansible
4 6 (18.18%) Grafana
4 6 (18.18%) Prometheus
5 5 (15.15%) Packer
6 2 (6.06%) logstash
6 2 (6.06%) Single Sign-On
7 1 (3.03%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 6 (18.18%) CA Agile Central
1 6 (18.18%) Splunk
2 5 (15.15%) Confluent
2 5 (15.15%) Databricks
2 5 (15.15%) IBM
2 5 (15.15%) Red Hat
3 3 (9.09%) Google
4 1 (3.03%) Dynatrace
4 1 (3.03%) Microsoft
4 1 (3.03%) VMware