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 October 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
21 Oct 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 124 135 183
Rank change year-on-year +11 +48 -19
Contract jobs citing Kafka 51 46 29
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 1.40% 1.09% 0.53%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 8.31% 6.68% 3.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 44 27 22
10th Percentile £288 £382 £450
25th Percentile £362 £400 £503
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £435 £475 £588
Median % change year-on-year -8.42% -19.15% -2.08%
75th Percentile £477 £535 £691
90th Percentile £574 £680 £736
England median daily rate £550 £600 £650
% change year-on-year -8.33% -7.69% +1.96%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 2 0
Median hourly rate - £28.00 -
England median hourly rate £59.25 £28.00 £78.00
% change year-on-year +111.61% -64.10% +6.48%

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 614 689 860
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East 16.86% 16.25% 15.63%
Number of daily rates quoted 434 450 560
10th Percentile £276 £324 £313
25th Percentile £375 £413 £418
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -9.52% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £568 £630 £625
90th Percentile £625 £671 £681
England median daily rate £510 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -7.27% - -4.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 13 25 41
10th Percentile £17.06 £38.50 £50.00
25th Percentile £46.25 £61.60 £54.50
Median hourly rate £50.00 £62.50 £58.59
Median % change year-on-year -20.00% +6.67% -9.86%
75th Percentile £55.00 £70.00 £73.71
90th Percentile £73.00 - £78.00
England median hourly rate £54.00 £65.00 £55.56
% change year-on-year -16.92% +16.99% -14.52%

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 October 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 21 October 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 +24 19 £435 -13.00% 10
Thames Valley -13 14 £513 +6.33% 57
Berkshire +1 13 £513 +6.33% 56
West Sussex -2 11 £288 -5.96% 9
East Sussex +4 4 £565 +59.72% 1
Surrey - 2 £635 - 8
Buckinghamshire -2 1 - -
Middlesex - 1 £635 -
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 (9.80%) Apache Spark
2 4 (7.84%) Confluence
3 1 (1.96%) Apache Airflow
3 1 (1.96%) CMS
Business Applications
1 3 (5.88%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 21 (41.18%) GitHub
2 20 (39.22%) AWS
3 12 (23.53%) GitHub Actions
4 11 (21.57%) OpenShift
5 10 (19.61%) Serverless
6 9 (17.65%) AWS Lambda
7 6 (11.76%) AWS CloudFormation
7 6 (11.76%) Azure
7 6 (11.76%) GCP
7 6 (11.76%) OCI
8 4 (7.84%) Datadog
9 3 (5.88%) Amazon EMR
9 3 (5.88%) Amazon Kinesis
9 3 (5.88%) Amazon S3
9 3 (5.88%) Azure DevOps
9 3 (5.88%) Cloud Computing
9 3 (5.88%) Snowflake
10 2 (3.92%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 2 (3.92%) IaaS
10 2 (3.92%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 4 (7.84%) Kerberos
2 1 (1.96%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 25 (49.02%) PostgreSQL
2 18 (35.29%) NoSQL
3 10 (19.61%) Couchbase
4 9 (17.65%) Amazon Redshift
5 7 (13.73%) MongoDB
6 6 (11.76%) Amazon RDS
6 6 (11.76%) Redis
7 5 (9.80%) Big Data
8 4 (7.84%) Apache Cassandra
8 4 (7.84%) Data Warehouse
8 4 (7.84%) DynamoDB
8 4 (7.84%) HBase
9 2 (3.92%) Azure SQL Database
9 2 (3.92%) Data Lake
9 2 (3.92%) Elasticsearch
10 1 (1.96%) Data Vault
10 1 (1.96%) Delta Lake
10 1 (1.96%) Metadata
10 1 (1.96%) MySQL
10 1 (1.96%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 29 (56.86%) Jenkins
2 16 (31.37%) Git
3 12 (23.53%) JIRA
4 7 (13.73%) Cucumber
4 7 (13.73%) GitLab
4 7 (13.73%) JUnit
4 7 (13.73%) Sonatype Nexus
4 7 (13.73%) Subversion
5 5 (9.80%) Artifactory
5 5 (9.80%) Gradle
6 4 (7.84%) Maven
7 3 (5.88%) JMeter
8 1 (1.96%) Bitbucket
8 1 (1.96%) Poetry
8 1 (1.96%) Pylint
8 1 (1.96%) SonarQube
General
1 10 (19.61%) Social Skills
2 8 (15.69%) Analytical Skills
3 3 (5.88%) Aerospace
3 3 (5.88%) Banking
3 3 (5.88%) Finance
3 3 (5.88%) Presentation Skills
3 3 (5.88%) Telecoms
4 1 (1.96%) Automotive
4 1 (1.96%) Retail
Job Titles
1 18 (35.29%) Developer
2 14 (27.45%) Senior
3 9 (17.65%) Data Engineer
4 8 (15.69%) DevOps Engineer
4 8 (15.69%) Java Developer
4 8 (15.69%) Senior Developer
5 7 (13.73%) Platform Engineer
6 5 (9.80%) Architect
6 5 (9.80%) Lead
7 4 (7.84%) AWS Developer
7 4 (7.84%) Senior Java Developer
8 3 (5.88%) AWS Engineer
8 3 (5.88%) Cloud Platform Engineer
8 3 (5.88%) Senior Data Engineer
8 3 (5.88%) Solutions Architect
9 2 (3.92%) AWS Data Engineer
9 2 (3.92%) Java Engineer
9 2 (3.92%) Project Engineer
9 2 (3.92%) Project Leader
9 2 (3.92%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 18 (35.29%) RabbitMQ
2 14 (27.45%) REST
3 9 (17.65%) Spring Boot
4 8 (15.69%) Elastic Stack
4 8 (15.69%) GraphQL
4 8 (15.69%) gRPC
4 8 (15.69%) Spring
5 5 (9.80%) Keycloak
5 5 (9.80%) YAML
6 4 (7.84%) Hibernate
7 2 (3.92%) Jinja
7 2 (3.92%) PySpark
8 1 (1.96%) JPA
8 1 (1.96%) OpenTelemetry
8 1 (1.96%) pytest
8 1 (1.96%) React
8 1 (1.96%) RESTful
8 1 (1.96%) Spring MVC
Miscellaneous
1 6 (11.76%) Replication
2 4 (7.84%) Cloud Native
2 4 (7.84%) Product Ownership
3 2 (3.92%) Distributed Architecture
3 2 (3.92%) Distributed Systems
4 1 (1.96%) Data Protection Act
4 1 (1.96%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 19 (37.25%) Linux
2 6 (11.76%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 35 (68.63%) CI/CD
2 22 (43.14%) Agile
3 20 (39.22%) Microservices
4 16 (31.37%) DevOps
5 15 (29.41%) Scrum
6 14 (27.45%) Problem-Solving
7 13 (25.49%) Observability
7 13 (25.49%) TDD
8 12 (23.53%) Computer Science
8 12 (23.53%) Containerisation
8 12 (23.53%) Continuous Integration
8 12 (23.53%) Software Engineering
9 11 (21.57%) Infrastructure as Code
9 11 (21.57%) Platform Engineering
9 11 (21.57%) Regression Testing
10 9 (17.65%) Analytics
10 9 (17.65%) BDD
11 8 (15.69%) Kanban
11 8 (15.69%) Scaled Agile Framework
11 8 (15.69%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 19 (37.25%) Java
2 17 (33.33%) Python
3 14 (27.45%) Go
4 7 (13.73%) Shell Script
4 7 (13.73%) SQL
5 5 (9.80%) Bash
6 4 (7.84%) Scala
7 1 (1.96%) Bicep
7 1 (1.96%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 12 (23.53%) Computer Science Degree
1 12 (23.53%) Degree
2 5 (9.80%) AWS Certification
3 4 (7.84%) OCP
3 4 (7.84%) Oracle Certification
3 4 (7.84%) SC Cleared
3 4 (7.84%) Security Cleared
4 3 (5.88%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (7.84%) Data Quality
2 3 (5.88%) Def Stans
3 1 (1.96%) GDPR
3 1 (1.96%) QA
System Software
1 17 (33.33%) Docker
2 2 (3.92%) Active Directory
3 1 (1.96%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 23 (45.10%) Kubernetes
2 15 (29.41%) Terraform
3 13 (25.49%) Grafana
4 11 (21.57%) Ansible
5 9 (17.65%) Prometheus
6 5 (9.80%) Packer
7 3 (5.88%) Progress Chef
8 2 (3.92%) logstash
8 2 (3.92%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 8 (15.69%) CA Agile Central
2 6 (11.76%) Confluent
2 6 (11.76%) IBM
2 6 (11.76%) Splunk
2 6 (11.76%) VMware
3 5 (9.80%) Databricks
3 5 (9.80%) Red Hat
4 4 (7.84%) Atlassian
5 3 (5.88%) Google
6 1 (1.96%) Dynatrace
6 1 (1.96%) Microsoft