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 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 170 123 136
Rank change year-on-year -47 +13 +41
Contract jobs citing Kafka 62 40 60
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 0.95% 1.17% 1.10%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 6.53% 6.88% 7.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 48 33 36
10th Percentile £294 £288 £375
25th Percentile £343 £350 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £435 £479
Median % change year-on-year +17.82% -9.09% -13.00%
75th Percentile £574 £588 £498
90th Percentile £615 £600 £529
England median daily rate £550 £550 £600
% change year-on-year - -8.26% -7.77%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 6
10th Percentile - - £24.88
25th Percentile - - £27.00
Median hourly rate - - £28.00
75th Percentile - - £33.50
90th Percentile - - £37.63
England median hourly rate £71.25 £62.50 £28.00
% change year-on-year +14.00% +123.21% -64.10%

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 950 581 789
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East 14.49% 16.94% 14.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 617 401 537
10th Percentile £321 £313 £325
25th Percentile £425 £400 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £495 £525
Median % change year-on-year +6.06% -5.71% -
75th Percentile £622 £575 £625
90th Percentile £700 £635 £667
England median daily rate £525 £521 £550
% change year-on-year +0.86% -5.36% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 50 22 41
10th Percentile £38.25 £21.48 £35.00
25th Percentile £53.13 £33.68 £56.50
Median hourly rate £70.00 £50.00 £61.60
Median % change year-on-year +40.00% -18.83% -1.44%
75th Percentile - £56.88 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.63 £58.75 £75.00
England median hourly rate £65.00 £60.00 £58.15
% change year-on-year +8.33% +3.18% -6.96%

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 July 2026.

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 July 2026. 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 -27 28 £558 +28.28% 7
Thames Valley -41 16 £358 -36.44% 3
Berkshire -24 14 £358 -35.00% 1
West Sussex -23 9 £294 +1.91% 3
Surrey -19 2 £460 -27.56% 3
Sussex - 2 £323 - 1
Oxfordshire - 2 £550 - 1
East Sussex - 2 £326 - 1
Middlesex -11 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 7 (11.29%) Apache Spark
2 2 (3.23%) Apache Pulsar
2 2 (3.23%) IBM HTTP Server
2 2 (3.23%) Oracle HTTP Server
2 2 (3.23%) WebSphere
2 2 (3.23%) WebSphere Application Server
2 2 (3.23%) WebSphere Portal
3 1 (1.61%) Apache Airflow
3 1 (1.61%) OpenStack
Applications
1 8 (12.90%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 1 (1.61%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 38 (61.29%) AWS
2 32 (51.61%) Azure
3 16 (25.81%) GCP
4 10 (16.13%) Serverless
5 8 (12.90%) Amazon S3
6 7 (11.29%) Azure DevOps
7 6 (9.68%) OpenShift
8 5 (8.06%) Amazon EKS
8 5 (8.06%) AWS Lambda
8 5 (8.06%) GitHub
8 5 (8.06%) Snowflake
9 4 (6.45%) Entra ID
10 3 (4.84%) AWS CloudFormation
11 2 (3.23%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 2 (3.23%) Apigee
11 2 (3.23%) AWS KMS
11 2 (3.23%) Azure AKS
11 2 (3.23%) GitHub Actions
11 2 (3.23%) Kong
11 2 (3.23%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 5 (8.06%) MQTT
2 4 (6.45%) Firewall
2 4 (6.45%) Network Security
3 3 (4.84%) HTTP
4 2 (3.23%) DNS
4 2 (3.23%) SSL
4 2 (3.23%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 26 (41.94%) PostgreSQL
2 20 (32.26%) NoSQL
3 14 (22.58%) Relational Database
4 10 (16.13%) MongoDB
5 8 (12.90%) Big Data
6 7 (11.29%) DynamoDB
7 6 (9.68%) Data Warehouse
8 4 (6.45%) Elasticsearch
9 3 (4.84%) Redis
10 2 (3.23%) Amazon Redshift
10 2 (3.23%) Apache Cassandra
10 2 (3.23%) Couchbase
10 2 (3.23%) Data Lake
10 2 (3.23%) Db2
10 2 (3.23%) RDBMS
10 2 (3.23%) SQL Server
11 1 (1.61%) Delta Lake
11 1 (1.61%) Power BI
11 1 (1.61%) Spark SQL
11 1 (1.61%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 17 (27.42%) Git
2 11 (17.74%) GitLab
3 8 (12.90%) Jenkins
4 4 (6.45%) JIRA
4 4 (6.45%) Postman
4 4 (6.45%) SonarQube
5 2 (3.23%) Introscope
5 2 (3.23%) JMeter
6 1 (1.61%) Gradle
6 1 (1.61%) JUnit
6 1 (1.61%) Maven
6 1 (1.61%) Oracle Forms
6 1 (1.61%) Subversion
General
1 12 (19.35%) Finance
1 12 (19.35%) Social Skills
2 8 (12.90%) Analytical Skills
3 6 (9.68%) Automotive
4 5 (8.06%) Public Sector
5 4 (6.45%) Banking
6 1 (1.61%) Organisational Skills
6 1 (1.61%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 30 (48.39%) Developer
2 10 (16.13%) Java Developer
3 8 (12.90%) Python Developer
4 7 (11.29%) Platform Engineer
5 6 (9.68%) DevSecOps Engineer
5 6 (9.68%) Senior
6 5 (8.06%) Salesforce Developer
7 4 (6.45%) Data Engineer
8 3 (4.84%) Middleware Engineer
8 3 (4.84%) Senior Middleware Engineer
9 2 (3.23%) Applications Developer
9 2 (3.23%) Automation Tester
9 2 (3.23%) Big Data Developer
9 2 (3.23%) DevOps Engineer
9 2 (3.23%) Full-Stack Engineer
9 2 (3.23%) Java Engineer
9 2 (3.23%) Project Manager
9 2 (3.23%) Senior Applications Developer
9 2 (3.23%) Senior Developer
9 2 (3.23%) Tester
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 15 (24.19%) RabbitMQ
1 15 (24.19%) RESTful
2 13 (20.97%) Spring
3 12 (19.35%) Spring Boot
4 11 (17.74%) REST
5 10 (16.13%) OpenAPI
5 10 (16.13%) Swagger
6 8 (12.90%) Django
6 8 (12.90%) FastAPI
6 8 (12.90%) Flask
6 8 (12.90%) NumPy
6 8 (12.90%) Pandas
6 8 (12.90%) pytest
7 7 (11.29%) gRPC
8 6 (9.68%) Keycloak
8 6 (9.68%) React
9 5 (8.06%) GraphQL
9 5 (8.06%) JSON
9 5 (8.06%) XML
10 4 (6.45%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 13 (20.97%) Cloud Native
2 11 (17.74%) Distributed Systems
3 10 (16.13%) Algorithms
3 10 (16.13%) Data Structures
4 5 (8.06%) Legacy Systems
5 4 (6.45%) Data Protection Act
5 4 (6.45%) Product Ownership
6 3 (4.84%) Onboarding
7 2 (3.23%) Clustering
7 2 (3.23%) Enterprise Software
8 1 (1.61%) AI Agents
8 1 (1.61%) Analytical Mindset
8 1 (1.61%) Chip and PIN
8 1 (1.61%) Distributed Architecture
8 1 (1.61%) EMV
8 1 (1.61%) Hybrid Cloud
Operating Systems
1 14 (22.58%) Linux
2 5 (8.06%) Unix
3 4 (6.45%) Windows
4 2 (3.23%) Oracle Linux
4 2 (3.23%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 2 (3.23%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 38 (61.29%) CI/CD
2 31 (50.00%) Containerisation
3 22 (35.48%) Microservices
4 21 (33.87%) DevOps
5 20 (32.26%) Agile
6 18 (29.03%) Migration
7 17 (27.42%) AI
8 16 (25.81%) Problem-Solving
9 15 (24.19%) Platform Engineering
9 15 (24.19%) Software Engineering
10 14 (22.58%) TDD
11 13 (20.97%) DevSecOps
12 11 (17.74%) Event-Driven
13 10 (16.13%) Machine Learning
14 9 (14.52%) Analytics
14 9 (14.52%) Infrastructure as Code
14 9 (14.52%) Scrum
15 8 (12.90%) Mathematics
15 8 (12.90%) Site Reliability Engineering
15 8 (12.90%) Software Testing
Programming Languages
1 32 (51.61%) Python
2 19 (30.65%) Java
3 12 (19.35%) SQL
4 10 (16.13%) Bash
5 6 (9.68%) Go
5 6 (9.68%) PowerShell
6 4 (6.45%) Rust
6 4 (6.45%) Shell Script
7 3 (4.84%) Bicep
7 3 (4.84%) JavaScript
7 3 (4.84%) Kotlin
7 3 (4.84%) TypeScript
8 2 (3.23%) Jython
8 2 (3.23%) Perl
8 2 (3.23%) PL/SQL
8 2 (3.23%) Scala
Qualifications
1 18 (29.03%) Security Cleared
2 12 (19.35%) SC Cleared
3 6 (9.68%) Degree
4 5 (8.06%) DV Cleared
5 4 (6.45%) BPSS Clearance
6 2 (3.23%) Computer Science Degree
7 1 (1.61%) AWS Certification
7 1 (1.61%) PMI Certification
7 1 (1.61%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 6 (9.68%) QA
2 3 (4.84%) Data Quality
3 2 (3.23%) PCI DSS
4 1 (1.61%) Actionable Recommendations
4 1 (1.61%) ISO 20022
4 1 (1.61%) ISO 8583
System Software
1 34 (54.84%) Docker
2 2 (3.23%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 36 (58.06%) Kubernetes
2 10 (16.13%) Grafana
2 10 (16.13%) Prometheus
2 10 (16.13%) Terraform
3 8 (12.90%) Ansible
4 4 (6.45%) Podman
4 4 (6.45%) Puppet
5 3 (4.84%) Argo
6 2 (3.23%) CA Wily
6 2 (3.23%) Istio
6 2 (3.23%) linkerd
6 2 (3.23%) Rancher
6 2 (3.23%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 11 (17.74%) Oracle
2 6 (9.68%) Salesforce
3 5 (8.06%) Siebel
3 5 (8.06%) Splunk
4 4 (6.45%) Ab Initio
4 4 (6.45%) NVIDIA
4 4 (6.45%) Tenable
4 4 (6.45%) Teradata
5 3 (4.84%) Databricks
5 3 (4.84%) IBM
5 3 (4.84%) Solace
6 2 (3.23%) AppDynamics
6 2 (3.23%) CA Agile Central
6 2 (3.23%) Red Hat
6 2 (3.23%) VMware
7 1 (1.61%) Google
7 1 (1.61%) Informatica
7 1 (1.61%) Microsoft
7 1 (1.61%) MuleSoft
7 1 (1.61%) TIBCO