linkerd Contract Job Trends in the UK excluding London

linkerd
UK > UK excluding London

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the UK excluding London requiring linkerd skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 4 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 418 332 403
Rank change year-on-year -86 +71 +41
Contract jobs citing linkerd 10 9 2
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 0.048% 0.069% 0.010%
As % of the Systems Management category 0.33% 0.45% 0.082%
Number of daily rates quoted 10 7 0
10th Percentile £357 £698 -
25th Percentile £416 £713 -
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £433 £750 -
Median % change year-on-year -42.33% - -
75th Percentile £523 - -
90th Percentile £652 - -
UK median daily rate £480 £725 -
% change year-on-year -33.79% - -

All Systems Management Skills
UK excluding London

linkerd 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 UK excluding London.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for systems management skills 3,054 2,018 2,439
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 14.53% 15.44% 11.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,140 1,320 1,733
10th Percentile £263 £223 £213
25th Percentile £400 £375 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £492 £500 £498
Median % change year-on-year -1.60% +0.50% -5.24%
75th Percentile £575 £589 £595
90th Percentile £655 £675 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 108 32 108
10th Percentile £16.58 £12.77 £14.00
25th Percentile £20.09 £19.51 £17.72
Median hourly rate £53.25 £24.09 £40.16
Median % change year-on-year +121.05% -40.01% -15.46%
75th Percentile £67.50 £42.06 £62.13
90th Percentile £79.30 £74.00 £76.82
UK median hourly rate £53.25 £25.50 £40.00
% change year-on-year +108.82% -36.25% -23.27%

linkerd
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing linkerd relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

linkerd job vacancy trend in the UK excluding London

linkerd
Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing linkerd.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing linkerd

linkerd
Daily Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing linkerd in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 4 March 2026.

Daily rate histogram for linkerd in the UK excluding London

linkerd
Contract Job Locations in the UK excluding London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing linkerd within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 4 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
South East - 8 £433 - 1
North West -37 2 £651 -13.20%
North of England -67 2 £651 -13.20%
linkerd
UK

linkerd
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding London 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 2 (20.00%) Apache Pulsar
Business Applications
1 1 (10.00%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 10 (100.00%) AWS
1 10 (100.00%) Azure
2 8 (80.00%) GitHub
2 8 (80.00%) GitHub Actions
3 6 (60.00%) OpenShift
4 4 (40.00%) Amazon EKS
4 4 (40.00%) AWS CloudFormation
4 4 (40.00%) Azure AKS
4 4 (40.00%) GCP
4 4 (40.00%) Google Kubernetes Engine
5 2 (20.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
5 2 (20.00%) Apigee
5 2 (20.00%) AWS KMS
5 2 (20.00%) Azure API Management
5 2 (20.00%) Azure DevOps
5 2 (20.00%) Kong
5 2 (20.00%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 2 (20.00%) Firewall
Database & Business Intelligence
1 6 (60.00%) PostgreSQL
1 6 (60.00%) Redis
Development Applications
1 8 (80.00%) GitLab
2 2 (20.00%) Jenkins
General
1 3 (30.00%) Banking
2 2 (20.00%) Finance
3 1 (10.00%) Public Sector
Job Titles
1 8 (80.00%) DevOps Engineer
2 2 (20.00%) Integration Engineer
2 2 (20.00%) Project Manager
2 2 (20.00%) Senior
2 2 (20.00%) Senior DevOps
2 2 (20.00%) Senior DevOps Engineer
2 2 (20.00%) Senior Integration Engineer
3 1 (10.00%) Cloud Infrastructure Manager
3 1 (10.00%) Delivery Manager
3 1 (10.00%) Delivery Project Manager
3 1 (10.00%) Infrastructure Delivery Manager
3 1 (10.00%) Infrastructure Manager
3 1 (10.00%) Infrastructure Project Manager
3 1 (10.00%) Technical Manager
3 1 (10.00%) Technical Project Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 8 (80.00%) Kafka
2 6 (60.00%) Keycloak
3 2 (20.00%) OAuth
3 2 (20.00%) OAuth2
3 2 (20.00%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 2 (20.00%) Cloud Native
1 2 (20.00%) Distributed Systems
1 2 (20.00%) Onboarding
2 1 (10.00%) Chip and PIN
2 1 (10.00%) EMV
Operating Systems
1 2 (20.00%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 10 (100.00%) CI/CD
1 10 (100.00%) Containerisation
1 10 (100.00%) Infrastructure as Code
2 8 (80.00%) DevOps
2 8 (80.00%) GitOps
2 8 (80.00%) Observability
3 7 (70.00%) DevSecOps
3 7 (70.00%) Platform Engineering
4 5 (50.00%) SBOM
5 2 (20.00%) Cloud Security
5 2 (20.00%) Cost Optimisation
5 2 (20.00%) Data Encryption
5 2 (20.00%) Decision-Making
5 2 (20.00%) Dynamic Application Security Testing
5 2 (20.00%) Event-Driven
5 2 (20.00%) Infrastructure Automation
5 2 (20.00%) Network Virtualisation
5 2 (20.00%) Re-Platforming
5 2 (20.00%) Secrets Management
5 2 (20.00%) Static Application Security Testing
Programming Languages
1 8 (80.00%) Bash
1 8 (80.00%) Python
2 4 (40.00%) Bicep
3 2 (20.00%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 7 (70.00%) Security Cleared
2 6 (60.00%) SC Cleared
3 3 (30.00%) AWS Certification
4 2 (20.00%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
4 2 (20.00%) Azure Certification
5 1 (10.00%) BPSS Clearance
5 1 (10.00%) Computer Science Degree
5 1 (10.00%) Degree
5 1 (10.00%) PMI Certification
5 1 (10.00%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (50.00%) NCSC
2 2 (20.00%) PCI DSS
3 1 (10.00%) ISO 20022
3 1 (10.00%) ISO 8583
System Software
1 2 (20.00%) Docker
Systems Management
1 10 (100.00%) Grafana
1 10 (100.00%) Istio
1 10 (100.00%) Kubernetes
1 10 (100.00%) Prometheus
1 10 (100.00%) Terraform
2 8 (80.00%) Argo
3 6 (60.00%) Ansible
Vendors
1 10 (100.00%) Splunk
2 6 (60.00%) Red Hat
2 6 (60.00%) VMware
3 2 (20.00%) Microsoft