Kubernetes Contract Job Trends in the South West

Kubernetes (k8s)
England > South West

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the South West requiring Kubernetes skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 10 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 47 60
Rank change year-on-year +15 +13 -22
Contract jobs citing Kubernetes 144 78 107
As % of all contract jobs in the South West 4.18% 4.41% 3.25%
As % of the Systems Management category 37.50% 24.45% 24.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 81 68 79
10th Percentile £400 £482 £473
25th Percentile £450 £532 £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £550
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +9.09% +4.76%
75th Percentile £613 £645 £600
90th Percentile £691 £720 £655
England median daily rate £525 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -4.55% - -12.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 3 7
10th Percentile - £78.96 £60.65
25th Percentile - £79.35 £68.13
Median hourly rate - £80.00 £74.44
Median % change year-on-year - +7.47% -4.56%
75th Percentile - £81.48 £75.97
90th Percentile - £82.37 £77.70
England median hourly rate £65.00 £80.00 £67.25
% change year-on-year -18.75% +18.96% -9.12%

All Systems Management Skills
South West

Kubernetes falls under the Systems Management category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring systems management skills in the South West.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for systems management skills 384 319 437
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South West 11.15% 18.04% 13.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 252 243 340
10th Percentile £306 £265 £215
25th Percentile £425 £447 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £533 £563 £525
Median % change year-on-year -5.33% +7.14% -4.55%
75th Percentile £610 £638 £600
90th Percentile £688 £699 £690
England median daily rate £510 £513 £523
% change year-on-year -0.49% -1.91% -9.13%
Number of hourly rates quoted 9 8 15
10th Percentile £46.00 £16.80 -
25th Percentile £46.50 £18.60 -
Median hourly rate £51.00 £65.00 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -21.54% +62.50% -48.55%
75th Percentile - £79.03 £74.22
90th Percentile - £80.89 £76.28
England median hourly rate £57.00 £40.00 £30.00
% change year-on-year +42.50% +33.33% -43.32%

Kubernetes
Job Vacancy Trend in the South West

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

Kubernetes job vacancy trend in the South West

Kubernetes
Daily Rate Trend in the South West

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the South West citing Kubernetes.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the South West citing Kubernetes

Kubernetes
Daily Rate Histogram in the South West

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Kubernetes in the South West over the 6 months to 10 June 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Kubernetes in the South West

Kubernetes
Hourly Rate Trend in the South West

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the South West citing Kubernetes.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the South West citing Kubernetes

Kubernetes
Contract Job Locations in the South West

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Kubernetes within the South West region over the 6 months to 10 June 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
Bristol +3 46 £550 +2.56% 13
Gloucestershire -2 35 £575 -9.80% 33
Wiltshire +9 32 £575 - 3
Dorset +6 19 £369 -32.91% 8
Somerset - 5 £463 - 9
Kubernetes
England

Kubernetes
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the South West 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 12 (8.33%) Apache Spark
2 5 (3.47%) Apache
3 4 (2.78%) Confluence
4 2 (1.39%) nginx
5 1 (0.69%) Apache Airflow
5 1 (0.69%) Oracle Coherence
Business Applications
1 5 (3.47%) Maximo
2 1 (0.69%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 71 (49.31%) AWS
2 58 (40.28%) Azure
3 33 (22.92%) GCP
4 24 (16.67%) GitHub
5 23 (15.97%) Azure DevOps
6 18 (12.50%) OpenShift
7 17 (11.81%) GitHub Actions
7 17 (11.81%) Serverless
8 13 (9.03%) Google Kubernetes Engine
9 12 (8.33%) Amazon EKS
10 11 (7.64%) AWS Lambda
11 10 (6.94%) Amazon S3
11 10 (6.94%) Azure AKS
12 9 (6.25%) Azure Key Vault
13 8 (5.56%) Datadog
14 7 (4.86%) Amazon ECS
14 7 (4.86%) AWS CloudFormation
15 5 (3.47%) Azure ExpressRoute
15 5 (3.47%) Azure Monitor
15 5 (3.47%) Azure Sentinel
Communications & Networking
1 11 (7.64%) VPN
2 9 (6.25%) DNS
3 6 (4.17%) Firewall
3 6 (4.17%) TCP/IP
4 4 (2.78%) Reverse Proxy
5 3 (2.08%) DHCP
5 3 (2.08%) Network Security
6 2 (1.39%) NAS
6 2 (1.39%) SAN
6 2 (1.39%) VLAN
7 1 (0.69%) AMQP
7 1 (0.69%) Calico
7 1 (0.69%) IPsec
7 1 (0.69%) Kerberos
7 1 (0.69%) LAN
7 1 (0.69%) SSH
7 1 (0.69%) WAN
7 1 (0.69%) WireGuard
Database & Business Intelligence
1 14 (9.72%) NoSQL
2 9 (6.25%) Relational Database
3 8 (5.56%) PostgreSQL
4 7 (4.86%) MongoDB
5 6 (4.17%) Big Data
5 6 (4.17%) Elasticsearch
5 6 (4.17%) Flink
6 4 (2.78%) Redis
7 3 (2.08%) Amazon RDS
7 3 (2.08%) Apache Cassandra
7 3 (2.08%) BigQuery
7 3 (2.08%) Geospatial Data
7 3 (2.08%) HBase
7 3 (2.08%) Oracle Database
8 2 (1.39%) CockroachDB
8 2 (1.39%) InfluxDB
9 1 (0.69%) Data Lake
9 1 (0.69%) DynamoDB
9 1 (0.69%) RDBMS
9 1 (0.69%) TimescaleDB
Development Applications
1 38 (26.39%) GitLab
2 31 (21.53%) Jenkins
3 24 (16.67%) Git
4 14 (9.72%) Gatling
5 12 (8.33%) LoadRunner
6 11 (7.64%) JMeter
7 7 (4.86%) JIRA
8 5 (3.47%) JUnit
8 5 (3.47%) Selenium
8 5 (3.47%) Sonatype Nexus
9 3 (2.08%) Cucumber
9 3 (2.08%) MSI
9 3 (2.08%) SonarQube
10 2 (1.39%) Bitbucket
10 2 (1.39%) MLflow
11 1 (0.69%) Burp Suite
11 1 (0.69%) Gradle
11 1 (0.69%) Postman
11 1 (0.69%) REST Assured
11 1 (0.69%) Spinnaker
General
1 10 (6.94%) Social Skills
2 8 (5.56%) Analytical Skills
2 8 (5.56%) Public Sector
3 3 (2.08%) Legal
4 2 (1.39%) Banking
4 2 (1.39%) Finance
4 2 (1.39%) Inclusion and Diversity
4 2 (1.39%) Military
5 1 (0.69%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 49 (34.03%) DevOps Engineer
2 25 (17.36%) Developer
3 15 (10.42%) GCP Engineer
4 13 (9.03%) Java Developer
4 13 (9.03%) Site Reliability Engineer
5 12 (8.33%) Site Engineer
6 11 (7.64%) Infrastructure Engineer
6 11 (7.64%) Performance Engineer
6 11 (7.64%) Senior
6 11 (7.64%) Software Engineer
7 9 (6.25%) Backend Developer
8 8 (5.56%) Azure DevOps Engineer
8 8 (5.56%) Azure Engineer
8 8 (5.56%) GCP DevOps
8 8 (5.56%) GCP DevOps Engineer
8 8 (5.56%) Platform Engineer
9 6 (4.17%) Cloud Engineer
9 6 (4.17%) Java Engineer
9 6 (4.17%) Python Developer
10 4 (2.78%) AWS Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 28 (19.44%) Spring Boot
2 26 (18.06%) Spring
3 19 (13.19%) Kafka
4 16 (11.11%) RESTful
5 13 (9.03%) REST
6 10 (6.94%) React
7 8 (5.56%) RabbitMQ
8 7 (4.86%) Node.js
9 6 (4.17%) Elastic Stack
9 6 (4.17%) Flask
9 6 (4.17%) gRPC
9 6 (4.17%) WebSockets
10 5 (3.47%) ARM Templates
10 5 (3.47%) FastAPI
10 5 (3.47%) Java Concurrency
11 4 (2.78%) Apache NiFi
11 4 (2.78%) GraphQL
11 4 (2.78%) Keycloak
12 3 (2.08%) .NET Core
12 3 (2.08%) Vue
Miscellaneous
1 28 (19.44%) Cloud Native
2 10 (6.94%) Enterprise Software
3 6 (4.17%) Hybrid Cloud
4 5 (3.47%) Distributed Systems
4 5 (3.47%) Onboarding
4 5 (3.47%) Product Ownership
5 4 (2.78%) Linux Command Line
5 4 (2.78%) Private Cloud
6 3 (2.08%) Clustering
6 3 (2.08%) Data Centre
6 3 (2.08%) Legacy Systems
6 3 (2.08%) Public Cloud
7 2 (1.39%) Mobile App
8 1 (0.69%) Learning Management System
8 1 (0.69%) PKI
8 1 (0.69%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 35 (24.31%) Linux
2 9 (6.25%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 8 (5.56%) Windows
4 5 (3.47%) Rocky
4 5 (3.47%) Ubuntu
5 4 (2.78%) Debian
6 3 (2.08%) Unix
7 2 (1.39%) Windows Server
8 1 (0.69%) CentOS
8 1 (0.69%) SUSE
Processes & Methodologies
1 104 (72.22%) CI/CD
2 101 (70.14%) DevOps
3 73 (50.69%) Containerisation
4 53 (36.81%) Infrastructure as Code
5 34 (23.61%) Microservices
6 32 (22.22%) Agile
7 30 (20.83%) Site Reliability Engineering
8 25 (17.36%) Observability
9 23 (15.97%) Problem-Solving
10 22 (15.28%) Infrastructure Engineering
10 22 (15.28%) Software Engineering
11 20 (13.89%) Cloud Security
12 19 (13.19%) Analytics
13 17 (11.81%) Continuous Improvement
14 15 (10.42%) DevSecOps
14 15 (10.42%) High Availability
14 15 (10.42%) Platform Engineering
14 15 (10.42%) Test Automation
15 14 (9.72%) Full-Stack Development
16 13 (9.03%) Code Quality
Programming Languages
1 62 (43.06%) Python
2 37 (25.69%) Java
3 31 (21.53%) SQL
4 26 (18.06%) Bash
5 20 (13.89%) Go
6 15 (10.42%) JavaScript
7 9 (6.25%) Bicep
8 8 (5.56%) TypeScript
9 6 (4.17%) PowerShell
10 3 (2.08%) C#
11 2 (1.39%) Groovy
11 2 (1.39%) Rust
11 2 (1.39%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 68 (47.22%) Security Cleared
2 46 (31.94%) SC Cleared
3 33 (22.92%) DV Cleared
4 8 (5.56%) Degree
5 7 (4.86%) Computer Science Degree
6 6 (4.17%) Azure Certification
6 6 (4.17%) CISM
6 6 (4.17%) CISSP
6 6 (4.17%) Microsoft Certification
7 5 (3.47%) ISO 27001 Lead Implementer
8 4 (2.78%) AWS Certification
9 3 (2.08%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
10 1 (0.69%) (ISC)2 CCSP
10 1 (0.69%) AWS Certified Developer
10 1 (0.69%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 1 (0.69%) CCSK
10 1 (0.69%) CCSP
10 1 (0.69%) Cisco Certification
10 1 (0.69%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
10 1 (0.69%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 10 (6.94%) QA
2 7 (4.86%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 7 (4.86%) NCSC
3 6 (4.17%) NIST
4 5 (3.47%) Accessibility
4 5 (3.47%) NIST 800
4 5 (3.47%) WCAG
5 1 (0.69%) Data Quality
5 1 (0.69%) Government Security Classifications
System Software
1 79 (54.86%) Docker
2 6 (4.17%) VMware Infrastructure
3 5 (3.47%) Hyper-V
4 3 (2.08%) Active Directory
5 2 (1.39%) KVM
5 2 (1.39%) VirtualBox
5 2 (1.39%) VMware ESXi
6 1 (0.69%) iptables
6 1 (0.69%) NFS
6 1 (0.69%) Virtual Machines
6 1 (0.69%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 67 (46.53%) Terraform
2 31 (21.53%) Prometheus
3 26 (18.06%) Ansible
3 26 (18.06%) Grafana
4 14 (9.72%) Argo
5 5 (3.47%) Istio
6 4 (2.78%) Nagios
6 4 (2.78%) Podman
6 4 (2.78%) Single Sign-On
7 3 (2.08%) Docker Swarm
7 3 (2.08%) Progress Chef
8 2 (1.39%) Cilium
8 2 (1.39%) Puppet
8 2 (1.39%) VxRail
9 1 (0.69%) Kibana
9 1 (0.69%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.69%) Kustomize
9 1 (0.69%) linkerd
9 1 (0.69%) logstash
9 1 (0.69%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 19 (13.19%) Microsoft
2 16 (11.11%) Red Hat
3 15 (10.42%) Dynatrace
3 15 (10.42%) Google
3 15 (10.42%) Splunk
4 11 (7.64%) AppDynamics
4 11 (7.64%) New Relic
4 11 (7.64%) VMware
5 8 (5.56%) Databricks
5 8 (5.56%) Oracle
6 6 (4.17%) IBM
7 4 (2.78%) Dell
8 2 (1.39%) BeyondTrust
8 2 (1.39%) BiZZdesign
8 2 (1.39%) Thales
9 1 (0.69%) Cisco
9 1 (0.69%) Cloudera
9 1 (0.69%) EMC
9 1 (0.69%) Sparx
9 1 (0.69%) webMethods