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

6 months to
21 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 142 125 169
Rank change year-on-year -17 +44 +15
Contract jobs citing Kafka 65 30 45
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 1.21% 1.01% 0.80%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 7.55% 5.95% 5.68%
Number of daily rates quoted 51 15 30
10th Percentile £321 £320 £358
25th Percentile £360 £404 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £433 £505 £494
Median % change year-on-year -14.36% +2.23% -5.90%
75th Percentile £494 £588 £538
90th Percentile £573 £675 £615
England median daily rate £550 £585 £550
% change year-on-year -5.98% +6.36% -15.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 0 1
Median hourly rate £40.00 - £35.00
England median hourly rate £70.00 £85.60 £38.60
% change year-on-year -18.22% +121.79% -48.54%

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 861 504 792
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East 15.97% 17.02% 14.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 605 323 444
10th Percentile £330 £350 £318
25th Percentile £413 £411 £412
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £503 £513 £500
Median % change year-on-year -1.95% +2.50% -7.83%
75th Percentile £600 £620 £613
90th Percentile £684 £663 £675
England median daily rate £525 £538 £540
% change year-on-year -2.33% -0.46% -6.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 30 15 37
10th Percentile £40.00 £28.36 £44.75
25th Percentile £46.25 £44.43 £56.50
Median hourly rate £55.00 £62.50 £61.60
Median % change year-on-year -12.00% +1.46% -5.23%
75th Percentile £67.50 - £70.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £71.81 £78.50
England median hourly rate £65.00 £64.50 £48.72
% change year-on-year +0.78% +32.39% -25.05%

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 21 March 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 21 March 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 -1 36 £434 -9.26% 2
Thames Valley -36 11 £481 -16.30% 6
Berkshire -31 9 £475 -5.94% 4
West Sussex -10 8 £368 +22.50% 3
East Sussex - 6 £450 -
Surrey -12 2 - -
Sussex - 2 £323 -
Oxfordshire - 2 £550 - 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 (7.69%) Confluence
2 4 (6.15%) Apache Spark
3 2 (3.08%) Apache Pulsar
4 1 (1.54%) IBM HTTP Server
4 1 (1.54%) OpenStack
4 1 (1.54%) Oracle HTTP Server
4 1 (1.54%) WebSphere
4 1 (1.54%) WebSphere Application Server
4 1 (1.54%) WebSphere Portal
Applications
1 2 (3.08%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 1 (1.54%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 40 (61.54%) AWS
2 35 (53.85%) GitHub
3 23 (35.38%) GitHub Actions
4 22 (33.85%) OpenShift
5 19 (29.23%) Azure
6 8 (12.31%) GCP
7 6 (9.23%) Amazon S3
7 6 (9.23%) Datadog
7 6 (9.23%) Serverless
8 5 (7.69%) Amazon EKS
9 4 (6.15%) AWS CloudFormation
9 4 (6.15%) AWS Lambda
10 3 (4.62%) Azure DevOps
10 3 (4.62%) Snowflake
11 2 (3.08%) AWS KMS
11 2 (3.08%) Azure AKS
11 2 (3.08%) Azure API Management
11 2 (3.08%) Google Kubernetes Engine
11 2 (3.08%) Kong
11 2 (3.08%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 5 (7.69%) Kerberos
2 3 (4.62%) Firewall
3 1 (1.54%) DNS
3 1 (1.54%) HTTP
3 1 (1.54%) MQTT
3 1 (1.54%) SSL
3 1 (1.54%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 44 (67.69%) PostgreSQL
2 24 (36.92%) NoSQL
3 15 (23.08%) MongoDB
4 12 (18.46%) Redis
5 11 (16.92%) DynamoDB
6 9 (13.85%) Relational Database
7 8 (12.31%) HBase
8 7 (10.77%) Big Data
8 7 (10.77%) Couchbase
9 6 (9.23%) Apache Cassandra
10 5 (7.69%) Data Warehouse
11 3 (4.62%) Amazon Redshift
12 2 (3.08%) Data Lake
12 2 (3.08%) Elasticsearch
12 2 (3.08%) SQL Server
13 1 (1.54%) DB2
13 1 (1.54%) Delta Lake
13 1 (1.54%) Power BI
13 1 (1.54%) RDBMS
13 1 (1.54%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 27 (41.54%) Jenkins
2 21 (32.31%) GitLab
3 16 (24.62%) Cucumber
3 16 (24.62%) JUnit
3 16 (24.62%) Sonatype Nexus
4 15 (23.08%) Git
5 10 (15.38%) JMeter
6 9 (13.85%) JIRA
7 8 (12.31%) Artifactory
7 8 (12.31%) Gradle
8 3 (4.62%) Maven
9 1 (1.54%) Gatling
9 1 (1.54%) Introscope
9 1 (1.54%) Oracle Forms
9 1 (1.54%) Postman
9 1 (1.54%) Subversion
General
1 17 (26.15%) Finance
2 14 (21.54%) Social Skills
3 10 (15.38%) Analytical Skills
4 4 (6.15%) Public Sector
5 3 (4.62%) Aerospace
6 2 (3.08%) Automotive
7 1 (1.54%) Banking
7 1 (1.54%) Organisational Skills
7 1 (1.54%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 34 (52.31%) Developer
2 21 (32.31%) Java Developer
3 15 (23.08%) Senior
4 11 (16.92%) DevOps Engineer
4 11 (16.92%) Senior Developer
5 7 (10.77%) Full-Stack Developer
5 7 (10.77%) Java Engineer
5 7 (10.77%) Senior Java Developer
6 6 (9.23%) AWS Developer
6 6 (9.23%) Full-Stack Java Developer
7 5 (7.69%) Lead
8 4 (6.15%) Data Engineer
8 4 (6.15%) Kafka Developer
9 3 (4.62%) AWS Engineer
9 3 (4.62%) Full-Stack Engineer
9 3 (4.62%) Python Developer
9 3 (4.62%) Software Engineer
10 2 (3.08%) Project Engineer
10 2 (3.08%) Project Leader
10 2 (3.08%) Project Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 24 (36.92%) Spring
2 20 (30.77%) Spring Boot
3 19 (29.23%) RabbitMQ
4 13 (20.00%) REST
5 10 (15.38%) Keycloak
6 7 (10.77%) Hibernate
7 6 (9.23%) Elastic Stack
8 5 (7.69%) React
9 3 (4.62%) gRPC
9 3 (4.62%) OAuth
9 3 (4.62%) OAuth2
9 3 (4.62%) OpenAPI
9 3 (4.62%) PySpark
9 3 (4.62%) Swagger
10 2 (3.08%) FastAPI
10 2 (3.08%) GraphQL
10 2 (3.08%) Node.js
10 2 (3.08%) NumPy
10 2 (3.08%) OpenTelemetry
10 2 (3.08%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 6 (9.23%) Cloud Native
2 5 (7.69%) Distributed Systems
3 3 (4.62%) Algorithms
3 3 (4.62%) Data Structures
4 2 (3.08%) Legacy Systems
4 2 (3.08%) Onboarding
5 1 (1.54%) Analytical Mindset
5 1 (1.54%) Chip and PIN
5 1 (1.54%) Clustering
5 1 (1.54%) Data Protection Act
5 1 (1.54%) Distributed Architecture
5 1 (1.54%) EMV
5 1 (1.54%) Enterprise Software
5 1 (1.54%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 15 (23.08%) Linux
2 4 (6.15%) Unix
3 3 (4.62%) Windows
4 2 (3.08%) VMS
5 1 (1.54%) Oracle Linux
5 1 (1.54%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (1.54%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 45 (69.23%) CI/CD
2 26 (40.00%) Microservices
3 25 (38.46%) Agile
4 24 (36.92%) Containerisation
5 21 (32.31%) Observability
6 18 (27.69%) DevOps
7 16 (24.62%) Problem-Solving
8 14 (21.54%) Infrastructure as Code
8 14 (21.54%) Platform Engineering
9 13 (20.00%) Software Engineering
10 12 (18.46%) TDD
11 11 (16.92%) Full-Stack Development
11 11 (16.92%) Test Automation
12 10 (15.38%) Event-Driven
13 9 (13.85%) Scrum
13 9 (13.85%) Software Testing
14 8 (12.31%) GitOps
15 7 (10.77%) Computer Science
15 7 (10.77%) Migration
15 7 (10.77%) Regression Testing
Programming Languages
1 33 (50.77%) Java
2 22 (33.85%) Python
3 12 (18.46%) Go
4 11 (16.92%) Bash
5 6 (9.23%) SQL
6 5 (7.69%) JavaScript
6 5 (7.69%) PowerShell
7 3 (4.62%) Bicep
8 2 (3.08%) Scala
9 1 (1.54%) Jython
9 1 (1.54%) Kotlin
9 1 (1.54%) Perl
9 1 (1.54%) Rust
9 1 (1.54%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 18 (27.69%) Security Cleared
2 16 (24.62%) SC Cleared
3 8 (12.31%) Degree
3 8 (12.31%) OCP
3 8 (12.31%) Oracle Certification
4 7 (10.77%) Computer Science Degree
5 2 (3.08%) BPSS Clearance
5 2 (3.08%) DV Cleared
6 1 (1.54%) AWS Certification
6 1 (1.54%) PMI Certification
6 1 (1.54%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (7.69%) NCSC
2 3 (4.62%) Data Quality
2 3 (4.62%) Def Stans
3 2 (3.08%) PCI DSS
3 2 (3.08%) QA
4 1 (1.54%) ISO 20022
4 1 (1.54%) ISO 8583
System Software
1 20 (30.77%) Docker
2 5 (7.69%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 43 (66.15%) Kubernetes
2 23 (35.38%) Grafana
3 22 (33.85%) Ansible
4 17 (26.15%) Prometheus
5 16 (24.62%) Terraform
6 9 (13.85%) Argo
7 8 (12.31%) Istio
7 8 (12.31%) linkerd
7 8 (12.31%) Progress Chef
8 2 (3.08%) Packer
8 2 (3.08%) Rancher
9 1 (1.54%) CA Wily
9 1 (1.54%) Podman
9 1 (1.54%) Puppet
9 1 (1.54%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 19 (29.23%) VMware
2 12 (18.46%) Splunk
3 8 (12.31%) Red Hat
4 5 (7.69%) Atlassian
5 4 (6.15%) Oracle
6 3 (4.62%) Ab Initio
6 3 (4.62%) CA Agile Central
6 3 (4.62%) Databricks
6 3 (4.62%) Microsoft
6 3 (4.62%) Teradata
7 2 (3.08%) IBM
7 2 (3.08%) Salesforce
7 2 (3.08%) Siebel
8 1 (1.54%) AppDynamics
8 1 (1.54%) Confluent
8 1 (1.54%) Solace