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

6 months to
20 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 150 129 158
Rank change year-on-year -21 +29 +18
Contract jobs citing Kafka 59 27 47
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 1.03% 0.90% 0.84%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 6.87% 5.47% 6.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 44 14 31
10th Percentile £323 £315 £313
25th Percentile £363 £403 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £443 £509 £482
Median % change year-on-year -13.02% +5.55% -10.33%
75th Percentile £550 £588 £500
90th Percentile £575 £649 £613
England median daily rate £537 £585 £550
% change year-on-year -8.21% +6.36% -15.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 0 4
10th Percentile - - £24.03
25th Percentile - - £25.94
Median hourly rate £40.00 - £31.50
75th Percentile - - £36.31
90th Percentile - - £38.68
England median hourly rate £70.00 £85.60 £31.50
% change year-on-year -18.22% +171.75% -58.82%

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 859 494 762
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East 15.03% 16.51% 13.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 587 318 458
10th Percentile £350 £350 £314
25th Percentile £414 £409 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% - -4.76%
75th Percentile £613 £600 £619
90th Percentile £700 £657 £675
England median daily rate £525 £530 £550
% change year-on-year -0.94% -3.64% -3.51%
Number of hourly rates quoted 41 17 35
10th Percentile £40.00 £28.99 £35.00
25th Percentile £46.25 £50.00 £55.75
Median hourly rate £55.00 £57.50 £61.60
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% -6.66% -5.23%
75th Percentile £70.00 £62.50 £67.50
90th Percentile £81.00 £69.13 £76.50
England median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £46.84
% change year-on-year - +38.77% -27.94%

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 April 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 April 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 0 35 £435 -15.12% 2
Thames Valley -43 13 £488 -15.22% 11
Berkshire -24 11 £439 -13.12% 2
West Sussex -9 5 £500 +66.67% 3
East Sussex - 2 £386 - 1
Sussex - 2 £323 -
Oxfordshire - 2 £550 - 5
Surrey -10 1 - - 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 8 (13.56%) Apache Spark
2 2 (3.39%) Apache Pulsar
2 2 (3.39%) IBM HTTP Server
2 2 (3.39%) Oracle HTTP Server
2 2 (3.39%) WebSphere
2 2 (3.39%) WebSphere Application Server
2 2 (3.39%) WebSphere Portal
3 1 (1.69%) Confluence
3 1 (1.69%) OpenStack
Applications
1 3 (5.08%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 1 (1.69%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 41 (69.49%) AWS
2 23 (38.98%) Azure
2 23 (38.98%) GitHub
3 21 (35.59%) OpenShift
4 14 (23.73%) GitHub Actions
5 10 (16.95%) GCP
6 9 (15.25%) Amazon S3
7 8 (13.56%) Serverless
8 6 (10.17%) Amazon EKS
8 6 (10.17%) AWS Lambda
8 6 (10.17%) Snowflake
9 4 (6.78%) Azure DevOps
10 3 (5.08%) AWS CloudFormation
10 3 (5.08%) Datadog
11 2 (3.39%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 2 (3.39%) Apigee
11 2 (3.39%) AWS KMS
11 2 (3.39%) Azure AKS
11 2 (3.39%) Kong
11 2 (3.39%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 4 (6.78%) Firewall
2 2 (3.39%) DNS
2 2 (3.39%) HTTP
2 2 (3.39%) Kerberos
2 2 (3.39%) SSL
2 2 (3.39%) TCP/IP
3 1 (1.69%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 42 (71.19%) PostgreSQL
2 21 (35.59%) NoSQL
3 12 (20.34%) Redis
3 12 (20.34%) Relational Database
4 11 (18.64%) DynamoDB
5 10 (16.95%) Big Data
5 10 (16.95%) MongoDB
6 7 (11.86%) Data Warehouse
7 5 (8.47%) HBase
8 2 (3.39%) Amazon Redshift
8 2 (3.39%) Apache Cassandra
8 2 (3.39%) Couchbase
8 2 (3.39%) Data Lake
8 2 (3.39%) Elasticsearch
8 2 (3.39%) SQL Server
9 1 (1.69%) DB2
9 1 (1.69%) Delta Lake
9 1 (1.69%) Power BI
9 1 (1.69%) RDBMS
9 1 (1.69%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 18 (30.51%) Jenkins
2 16 (27.12%) GitLab
3 11 (18.64%) Cucumber
3 11 (18.64%) Git
3 11 (18.64%) JUnit
3 11 (18.64%) Sonatype Nexus
4 8 (13.56%) JMeter
5 5 (8.47%) Artifactory
5 5 (8.47%) Gradle
6 4 (6.78%) JIRA
7 2 (3.39%) Introscope
8 1 (1.69%) Gatling
8 1 (1.69%) Oracle Forms
8 1 (1.69%) Postman
General
1 19 (32.20%) Finance
2 16 (27.12%) Social Skills
3 7 (11.86%) Analytical Skills
4 5 (8.47%) Automotive
4 5 (8.47%) Public Sector
5 1 (1.69%) Banking
5 1 (1.69%) Organisational Skills
5 1 (1.69%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 35 (59.32%) Developer
2 21 (35.59%) Java Developer
3 11 (18.64%) DevOps Engineer
4 10 (16.95%) Senior
5 7 (11.86%) Full-Stack Developer
5 7 (11.86%) Senior Developer
6 6 (10.17%) Full-Stack Java Developer
7 5 (8.47%) Java Engineer
7 5 (8.47%) Salesforce Developer
7 5 (8.47%) Senior Java Developer
8 4 (6.78%) AWS Developer
9 3 (5.08%) Applications Developer
9 3 (5.08%) Data Engineer
9 3 (5.08%) Kafka Developer
9 3 (5.08%) Python Developer
10 2 (3.39%) AWS Engineer
10 2 (3.39%) Java Applications Developer
10 2 (3.39%) Project Manager
10 2 (3.39%) Senior Applications Developer
10 2 (3.39%) Senior Middleware Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 23 (38.98%) Spring
2 16 (27.12%) Spring Boot
3 11 (18.64%) Keycloak
3 11 (18.64%) RabbitMQ
4 6 (10.17%) REST
5 5 (8.47%) Hibernate
5 5 (8.47%) React
6 4 (6.78%) OpenAPI
6 4 (6.78%) Swagger
7 3 (5.08%) Django
7 3 (5.08%) Elastic Stack
7 3 (5.08%) FastAPI
7 3 (5.08%) Flask
7 3 (5.08%) NumPy
7 3 (5.08%) OAuth
7 3 (5.08%) OAuth2
7 3 (5.08%) Pandas
7 3 (5.08%) PySpark
7 3 (5.08%) pytest
7 3 (5.08%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 7 (11.86%) Cloud Native
2 5 (8.47%) Distributed Systems
2 5 (8.47%) Legacy Systems
3 4 (6.78%) Algorithms
3 4 (6.78%) Data Structures
4 2 (3.39%) Clustering
4 2 (3.39%) Enterprise Software
4 2 (3.39%) Onboarding
5 1 (1.69%) Analytical Mindset
5 1 (1.69%) Chip and PIN
5 1 (1.69%) Data Protection Act
5 1 (1.69%) Distributed Architecture
5 1 (1.69%) EMV
Operating Systems
1 14 (23.73%) Linux
2 6 (10.17%) Unix
3 4 (6.78%) Windows
4 2 (3.39%) Oracle Linux
4 2 (3.39%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 2 (3.39%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
4 2 (3.39%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 44 (74.58%) CI/CD
2 26 (44.07%) Containerisation
3 22 (37.29%) Agile
4 19 (32.20%) DevOps
5 17 (28.81%) Microservices
5 17 (28.81%) Observability
6 16 (27.12%) Platform Engineering
7 14 (23.73%) Infrastructure as Code
7 14 (23.73%) Migration
8 13 (22.03%) Problem-Solving
9 11 (18.64%) Software Engineering
10 9 (15.25%) ETL
10 9 (15.25%) Full-Stack Development
10 9 (15.25%) GitOps
11 8 (13.56%) Event-Driven
11 8 (13.56%) Software Testing
11 8 (13.56%) TDD
12 7 (11.86%) High Availability
12 7 (11.86%) Scrum
13 6 (10.17%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 29 (49.15%) Java
2 23 (38.98%) Python
3 12 (20.34%) Bash
4 9 (15.25%) SQL
5 7 (11.86%) PowerShell
6 5 (8.47%) Go
6 5 (8.47%) JavaScript
7 3 (5.08%) Bicep
8 2 (3.39%) Jython
8 2 (3.39%) Kotlin
8 2 (3.39%) Perl
8 2 (3.39%) Scala
9 1 (1.69%) Rust
9 1 (1.69%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 15 (25.42%) Security Cleared
2 13 (22.03%) SC Cleared
3 5 (8.47%) OCP
3 5 (8.47%) Oracle Certification
4 4 (6.78%) Degree
5 3 (5.08%) Computer Science Degree
6 2 (3.39%) BPSS Clearance
6 2 (3.39%) DV Cleared
7 1 (1.69%) AWS Certification
7 1 (1.69%) PMI Certification
7 1 (1.69%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (8.47%) NCSC
2 3 (5.08%) Data Quality
2 3 (5.08%) QA
3 2 (3.39%) PCI DSS
4 1 (1.69%) ISO 20022
4 1 (1.69%) ISO 8583
System Software
1 18 (30.51%) Docker
2 6 (10.17%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 39 (66.10%) Kubernetes
2 22 (37.29%) Ansible
3 18 (30.51%) Grafana
4 16 (27.12%) Terraform
5 15 (25.42%) Prometheus
6 10 (16.95%) Argo
7 8 (13.56%) Istio
7 8 (13.56%) linkerd
8 6 (10.17%) Progress Chef
9 3 (5.08%) Rancher
10 2 (3.39%) CA Wily
10 2 (3.39%) Packer
10 2 (3.39%) Tivoli
11 1 (1.69%) Podman
11 1 (1.69%) Puppet
Vendors
1 15 (25.42%) VMware
2 13 (22.03%) Splunk
3 9 (15.25%) Red Hat
4 8 (13.56%) Oracle
5 5 (8.47%) Ab Initio
5 5 (8.47%) Salesforce
5 5 (8.47%) Siebel
5 5 (8.47%) Teradata
6 3 (5.08%) Databricks
6 3 (5.08%) Microsoft
7 2 (3.39%) AppDynamics
7 2 (3.39%) IBM
8 1 (1.69%) Atlassian
8 1 (1.69%) CA Agile Central
8 1 (1.69%) Solace