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 contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 20 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 131 133 177
Rank change year-on-year +2 +44 -9
Contract jobs citing Kafka 58 37 27
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 1.33% 0.99% 0.54%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 8.33% 6.21% 3.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 50 17 21
10th Percentile £358 £352 £425
25th Percentile £363 £450 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £433 £515 £525
Median % change year-on-year -16.02% -1.90% -12.50%
75th Percentile £478 £675 £638
90th Percentile £573 £688 £719
England median daily rate £550 £613 £625
% change year-on-year -10.20% -2.00% -1.96%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 0 0
Median hourly rate £40.00 - -
England median hourly rate £59.25 £85.00 £77.50
% change year-on-year -30.29% +9.68% +5.80%

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 696 596 814
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East 15.92% 16.01% 16.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 498 386 466
10th Percentile £275 £300 £313
25th Percentile £400 £406 £414
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £480 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.95% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £575 £638 £622
90th Percentile £649 £675 £680
England median daily rate £513 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -6.82% - -4.68%
Number of hourly rates quoted 21 11 35
10th Percentile £40.00 £54.63 £46.76
25th Percentile £46.25 £60.38 £55.00
Median hourly rate £47.50 £62.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year -24.00% - -3.85%
75th Percentile £77.50 £66.88 £76.53
90th Percentile £81.00 £70.00 £78.00
England median hourly rate £61.00 £65.00 £52.20
% change year-on-year -6.15% +24.53% -19.70%

Kafka
Job Vacancy Trend in the South East

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Kafka relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East.

Kafka job vacancy trend 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 20 December 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 20 December 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
Hampshire +9 32 £434 -13.25% 1
Berkshire -9 11 £475 -29.63%
Thames Valley -22 11 £475 -7.77% 1
West Sussex -6 8 £309 +45.29%
East Sussex +9 5 £508 +43.46%
Middlesex - 1 £635 -
Surrey - 1 - -
Kafka
England

Kafka
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 5 (8.62%) Confluence
2 3 (5.17%) Apache Spark
3 1 (1.72%) Apache Airflow
Cloud Services
1 36 (62.07%) GitHub
2 34 (58.62%) AWS
3 25 (43.10%) GitHub Actions
4 21 (36.21%) OpenShift
5 11 (18.97%) Azure
6 8 (13.79%) Serverless
7 6 (10.34%) AWS CloudFormation
7 6 (10.34%) AWS Lambda
7 6 (10.34%) Datadog
7 6 (10.34%) OCI
8 5 (8.62%) GCP
9 3 (5.17%) Azure DevOps
10 2 (3.45%) Azure Data Factory
10 2 (3.45%) Azure Monitor
10 2 (3.45%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 2 (3.45%) Google Kubernetes Engine
10 2 (3.45%) IaaS
10 2 (3.45%) PaaS
11 1 (1.72%) Azure Key Vault
11 1 (1.72%) Dagster
Communications & Networking
1 5 (8.62%) Kerberos
2 2 (3.45%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 37 (63.79%) PostgreSQL
2 22 (37.93%) NoSQL
3 11 (18.97%) Couchbase
3 11 (18.97%) Redis
4 10 (17.24%) MongoDB
5 8 (13.79%) HBase
6 6 (10.34%) Amazon RDS
6 6 (10.34%) Amazon Redshift
6 6 (10.34%) DynamoDB
7 5 (8.62%) Apache Cassandra
8 4 (6.90%) Big Data
9 2 (3.45%) Azure SQL Database
9 2 (3.45%) Data Lake
9 2 (3.45%) Elasticsearch
10 1 (1.72%) Data Vault
10 1 (1.72%) Data Warehouse
10 1 (1.72%) Delta Lake
10 1 (1.72%) MySQL
10 1 (1.72%) Relational Database
10 1 (1.72%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 32 (55.17%) Jenkins
2 17 (29.31%) Cucumber
2 17 (29.31%) GitLab
2 17 (29.31%) JUnit
2 17 (29.31%) Sonatype Nexus
3 15 (25.86%) Git
4 10 (17.24%) JMeter
5 9 (15.52%) Gradle
5 9 (15.52%) JIRA
6 8 (13.79%) Artifactory
7 4 (6.90%) Maven
8 3 (5.17%) Subversion
9 1 (1.72%) Gatling
9 1 (1.72%) Poetry
9 1 (1.72%) Pylint
9 1 (1.72%) SonarQube
General
1 11 (18.97%) Finance
2 9 (15.52%) Social Skills
3 6 (10.34%) Analytical Skills
4 3 (5.17%) Aerospace
5 1 (1.72%) Automotive
5 1 (1.72%) Banking
5 1 (1.72%) Public Sector
5 1 (1.72%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 26 (44.83%) Developer
2 18 (31.03%) Java Developer
3 16 (27.59%) Senior
4 13 (22.41%) DevOps Engineer
5 12 (20.69%) Senior Developer
6 7 (12.07%) Data Engineer
6 7 (12.07%) Full-Stack Developer
6 7 (12.07%) Full-Stack Java Developer
6 7 (12.07%) Senior Java Developer
7 6 (10.34%) AWS Developer
8 5 (8.62%) Java Engineer
8 5 (8.62%) Lead
8 5 (8.62%) Platform Engineer
9 4 (6.90%) AWS Engineer
9 4 (6.90%) Kafka Developer
10 2 (3.45%) Full-Stack Engineer
10 2 (3.45%) Kafka Engineer
10 2 (3.45%) Project Engineer
10 2 (3.45%) Project Leader
10 2 (3.45%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 18 (31.03%) Spring
2 17 (29.31%) RabbitMQ
3 13 (22.41%) Spring Boot
4 12 (20.69%) REST
5 10 (17.24%) Keycloak
6 8 (13.79%) Hibernate
7 6 (10.34%) Elastic Stack
8 5 (8.62%) gRPC
9 4 (6.90%) GraphQL
10 3 (5.17%) YAML
11 2 (3.45%) Jinja
11 2 (3.45%) PySpark
12 1 (1.72%) Apache NiFi
12 1 (1.72%) Express.js
12 1 (1.72%) MERN Stack
12 1 (1.72%) Node.js
12 1 (1.72%) pytest
12 1 (1.72%) React
12 1 (1.72%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 6 (10.34%) Replication
2 2 (3.45%) Distributed Architecture
2 2 (3.45%) Distributed Systems
3 1 (1.72%) Cloud Native
3 1 (1.72%) Data Protection Act
3 1 (1.72%) IoT
3 1 (1.72%) Product Ownership
Operating Systems
1 22 (37.93%) Linux
2 6 (10.34%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 43 (74.14%) CI/CD
2 21 (36.21%) Observability
3 20 (34.48%) Agile
3 20 (34.48%) Microservices
4 17 (29.31%) DevOps
5 16 (27.59%) Containerisation
5 16 (27.59%) Infrastructure as Code
6 15 (25.86%) Platform Engineering
7 12 (20.69%) Test Automation
8 11 (18.97%) TDD
9 10 (17.24%) Full-Stack Development
9 10 (17.24%) Problem-Solving
9 10 (17.24%) Scrum
10 9 (15.52%) Continuous Integration
10 9 (15.52%) Event-Driven
11 8 (13.79%) Regression Testing
11 8 (13.79%) Software Engineering
12 7 (12.07%) Computer Science
12 7 (12.07%) GitOps
12 7 (12.07%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 26 (44.83%) Java
2 22 (37.93%) Python
3 11 (18.97%) Go
4 9 (15.52%) Bash
5 7 (12.07%) Shell Script
6 3 (5.17%) SQL
7 1 (1.72%) Bicep
7 1 (1.72%) JavaScript
7 1 (1.72%) PowerShell
7 1 (1.72%) Rust
7 1 (1.72%) Scala
7 1 (1.72%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 13 (22.41%) SC Cleared
1 13 (22.41%) Security Cleared
2 8 (13.79%) OCP
2 8 (13.79%) Oracle Certification
3 7 (12.07%) Computer Science Degree
3 7 (12.07%) Degree
4 2 (3.45%) AWS Certification
5 1 (1.72%) BPSS Clearance
5 1 (1.72%) DV Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (8.62%) NCSC
2 3 (5.17%) Def Stans
3 2 (3.45%) QA
4 1 (1.72%) Data Quality
4 1 (1.72%) GDPR
System Software
1 14 (24.14%) Docker
2 5 (8.62%) VMware Infrastructure
3 2 (3.45%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 34 (58.62%) Kubernetes
2 22 (37.93%) Ansible
3 21 (36.21%) Grafana
4 20 (34.48%) Terraform
5 15 (25.86%) Prometheus
6 9 (15.52%) Progress Chef
7 7 (12.07%) Argo
8 6 (10.34%) Istio
8 6 (10.34%) linkerd
9 3 (5.17%) Packer
10 2 (3.45%) logstash
10 2 (3.45%) Single Sign-On
11 1 (1.72%) Podman
11 1 (1.72%) Puppet
11 1 (1.72%) Rancher
Vendors
1 19 (32.76%) VMware
2 10 (17.24%) Splunk
3 9 (15.52%) Red Hat
4 6 (10.34%) Confluent
4 6 (10.34%) IBM
5 5 (8.62%) Atlassian
6 4 (6.90%) CA Agile Central
6 4 (6.90%) Databricks
7 3 (5.17%) Google
7 3 (5.17%) Microsoft