Kafka Contract Job Trends

Apache Kafka
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Kafka skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 21 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
21 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 128 102 165
Rank change year-on-year -26 +63 -33
Contract jobs citing Kafka 944 751 630
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.04% 2.55% 1.45%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 10.04% 11.23% 7.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 587 483 468
10th Percentile £363 £400 £384
25th Percentile £414 £463 £456
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £560 £535
Median % change year-on-year -6.25% +4.67% -17.69%
75th Percentile £650 £731 £675
90th Percentile £800 £838 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £465 £477 £487
% change year-on-year -2.41% -2.16% -8.11%
Number of hourly rates quoted 18 4 6
10th Percentile £40.00 £51.09 £22.24
25th Percentile £64.00 £68.84 £23.81
Median hourly rate £70.00 £85.60 £31.50
Median % change year-on-year -18.22% +171.75% -58.82%
75th Percentile £87.25 £93.75 £38.94
90th Percentile £91.50 - £54.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.72 £78.70 £31.50
% change year-on-year -11.41% +149.84% -59.62%

All Software Libraries and Frameworks
UK

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.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for technical specification, industry standards, software libraries and framework skills 9,405 6,685 8,888
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 20.32% 22.70% 20.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,253 4,581 6,172
10th Percentile £358 £363 £334
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.90% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £492 £500
% change year-on-year +1.63% -1.60% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 265 104 204
10th Percentile £35.00 £27.22 £20.77
25th Percentile £52.50 £50.80 £37.49
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year - +40.75% -28.95%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £83.69 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £47.50
% change year-on-year - +36.84% -25.78%

Kafka
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Kafka relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Kafka job vacancy trend in the UK

Kafka
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Kafka.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Kafka

Kafka
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Kafka over the 6 months to 21 April 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Kafka.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Kafka

Kafka
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Kafka over the 6 months to 21 April 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
Top 16 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Kafka within the UK over the 6 months to 21 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
England -27 823 £537 -8.21% 181
London -19 518 £600 -6.80% 105
Work from Home -4 328 £600 -4.00% 68
UK excluding London -53 285 £465 -2.41% 112
North of England -42 124 £458 -12.86% 20
Yorkshire -31 60 £458 -34.64% 4
South East -24 58 £435 -14.50% 33
North West -56 54 £465 -7.00% 13
Midlands -33 51 £500 +37.93% 10
South West -13 31 £550 -12.00% 22
West Midlands -38 30 £525 -12.50% 4
Scotland -20 24 £475 +5.56% 8
East Midlands -24 21 £419 +17.30% 6
North East -9 16 £450 -3.23% 3
East of England -30 12 £500 +57.14% 11
Wales -9 1 £250 - 1

Kafka
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities 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
1 128 (13.56%) Apache Spark
2 64 (6.78%) Apache
3 44 (4.66%) Apache Airflow
4 25 (2.65%) Confluence
5 6 (0.64%) Ethereum
5 6 (0.64%) Hyperledger
6 5 (0.53%) Camunda
6 5 (0.53%) Microsoft Exchange
6 5 (0.53%) MQSeries
6 5 (0.53%) OpenStack
7 4 (0.42%) WebSphere
8 3 (0.32%) Palantir Foundry
9 2 (0.21%) Apache Pulsar
9 2 (0.21%) IBM HTTP Server
9 2 (0.21%) Oracle HTTP Server
9 2 (0.21%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 2 (0.21%) SharePoint
9 2 (0.21%) WebLogic
9 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
9 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Portal
Applications
1 4 (0.42%) Chatbot
2 3 (0.32%) CPLEX
3 2 (0.21%) PlantUML
4 1 (0.11%) Maya
4 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Project
4 1 (0.11%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 4 (0.42%) Bloomberg AIM
1 4 (0.42%) Fidessa
2 3 (0.32%) Oracle 11i
2 3 (0.32%) Payment Gateway
2 3 (0.32%) SAP BRIM
3 2 (0.21%) Actimize
3 2 (0.21%) Shopify
3 2 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.11%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.11%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.11%) R3 Corda
Cloud Services
1 576 (61.02%) AWS
2 275 (29.13%) Azure
3 166 (17.58%) GCP
4 154 (16.31%) GitHub
5 126 (13.35%) Serverless
6 121 (12.82%) Amazon S3
7 109 (11.55%) GitHub Actions
8 95 (10.06%) AWS Lambda
9 81 (8.58%) Amazon EKS
10 68 (7.20%) AWS CloudFormation
11 62 (6.57%) OpenShift
12 60 (6.36%) Power Platform
13 59 (6.25%) Azure DevOps
14 54 (5.72%) Amazon ECS
15 49 (5.19%) Amazon SQS
16 47 (4.98%) Amazon Kinesis
17 44 (4.66%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 42 (4.45%) Snowflake
19 40 (4.24%) Azure Data Factory
20 38 (4.03%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 20 (2.12%) Firewall
2 17 (1.80%) HTTP
3 12 (1.27%) SSL
4 9 (0.95%) DNS
5 6 (0.64%) FTP
5 6 (0.64%) SMS
5 6 (0.64%) SSH
6 5 (0.53%) TCP/IP
7 3 (0.32%) VPN
8 2 (0.21%) Kerberos
8 2 (0.21%) NaaS
8 2 (0.21%) OpenVPN
8 2 (0.21%) Reverse Proxy
8 2 (0.21%) WAN
9 1 (0.11%) 4G
9 1 (0.11%) 5G
9 1 (0.11%) Internet
9 1 (0.11%) MIMO
9 1 (0.11%) MQTT
9 1 (0.11%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 198 (20.97%) PostgreSQL
2 133 (14.09%) MongoDB
3 127 (13.45%) NoSQL
4 71 (7.52%) Relational Database
5 66 (6.99%) Apache Cassandra
6 61 (6.46%) Data Lake
7 58 (6.14%) Data Warehouse
8 54 (5.72%) Big Data
9 51 (5.40%) Elasticsearch
10 48 (5.08%) DynamoDB
10 48 (5.08%) Power BI
10 48 (5.08%) Redis
11 46 (4.87%) SQL Server
12 41 (4.34%) Flink
13 38 (4.03%) Amazon Athena
14 37 (3.92%) Amazon RDS
14 37 (3.92%) MySQL
15 35 (3.71%) Hadoop
15 35 (3.71%) Metadata
16 33 (3.50%) Amazon Redshift
Development Applications
1 146 (15.47%) Jenkins
2 129 (13.67%) GitLab
3 114 (12.08%) Git
4 65 (6.89%) JUnit
5 57 (6.04%) JIRA
6 35 (3.71%) Mockito
7 24 (2.54%) Cucumber
8 20 (2.12%) Gradle
9 14 (1.48%) Gatling
9 14 (1.48%) JMeter
10 11 (1.17%) Maven
10 11 (1.17%) Postman
10 11 (1.17%) REST Assured
10 11 (1.17%) Selenium
11 10 (1.06%) CircleCI
11 10 (1.06%) Jaeger
11 10 (1.06%) Sonatype Nexus
12 7 (0.74%) Artifactory
12 7 (0.74%) Liquibase
13 6 (0.64%) Serenity BDD
General
1 264 (27.97%) Finance
2 187 (19.81%) Social Skills
3 115 (12.18%) Banking
4 74 (7.84%) Public Sector
5 72 (7.63%) Analytical Skills
6 53 (5.61%) Front Office
7 29 (3.07%) Investment Banking
8 27 (2.86%) Documentation Skills
9 18 (1.91%) Financial Institution
10 12 (1.27%) Telecoms
11 11 (1.17%) Marketing
12 10 (1.06%) Influencing Skills
13 7 (0.74%) Law
13 7 (0.74%) Retail
14 6 (0.64%) Automotive
14 6 (0.64%) Publishing
15 4 (0.42%) Billing
15 4 (0.42%) Corporate Banking
15 4 (0.42%) Inclusion and Diversity
16 3 (0.32%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 336 (35.59%) Developer
2 226 (23.94%) Senior
3 164 (17.37%) Java Developer
4 152 (16.10%) Data Engineer
5 115 (12.18%) Lead
6 106 (11.23%) Architect
7 105 (11.12%) Senior Developer
8 96 (10.17%) Software Engineer
9 55 (5.83%) Senior Java Developer
10 54 (5.72%) Java Engineer
11 52 (5.51%) AWS Architect
12 49 (5.19%) DevOps Engineer
13 48 (5.08%) Full-Stack Developer
14 41 (4.34%) AWS Engineer
15 40 (4.24%) Solutions Architect
16 38 (4.03%) Senior Data Engineer
17 35 (3.71%) Kafka Developer
18 34 (3.60%) Kafka Engineer
19 33 (3.50%) Developer/Software Engineer
20 32 (3.39%) Full-Stack Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 210 (22.25%) Spring
2 188 (19.92%) Spring Boot
3 120 (12.71%) REST
4 114 (12.08%) Node.js
5 103 (10.91%) React
6 101 (10.70%) RESTful
7 78 (8.26%) gRPC
8 74 (7.84%) RabbitMQ
9 50 (5.30%) OpenTelemetry
10 49 (5.19%) GraphQL
11 48 (5.08%) JSON
12 43 (4.56%) AngularJS
13 42 (4.45%) PySpark
14 41 (4.34%) Middleware
15 38 (4.03%) Apache Avro
16 37 (3.92%) OAuth
17 34 (3.60%) Redux
18 30 (3.18%) OAuth2
19 28 (2.97%) Keycloak
19 28 (2.97%) WireMock
Miscellaneous
1 156 (16.53%) Distributed Systems
2 133 (14.09%) Cloud Native
3 50 (5.30%) Fixed Income
4 48 (5.08%) Management Information System
5 38 (4.03%) Product Ownership
6 22 (2.33%) Hybrid Cloud
7 21 (2.22%) Data Structures
8 20 (2.12%) Onboarding
9 19 (2.01%) Equities
10 17 (1.80%) Derivative
11 16 (1.69%) Legacy Systems
12 15 (1.59%) Enterprise Software
13 14 (1.48%) Algorithms
14 12 (1.27%) Clustering
14 12 (1.27%) Data Protection Act
15 11 (1.17%) Market Risk
15 11 (1.17%) Replication
16 9 (0.95%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
16 9 (0.95%) Legacy Applications
16 9 (0.95%) SWIFT Messaging Network
Operating Systems
1 112 (11.86%) Linux
2 56 (5.93%) Unix
3 33 (3.50%) Windows
4 9 (0.95%) Mac OS X
5 5 (0.53%) AIX
6 4 (0.42%) Ubuntu
7 3 (0.32%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 3 (0.32%) VMS
7 3 (0.32%) zOS
8 2 (0.21%) Debian
8 2 (0.21%) Mac OS
8 2 (0.21%) Oracle Linux
8 2 (0.21%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
9 1 (0.11%) CentOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 427 (45.23%) CI/CD
2 327 (34.64%) Microservices
3 315 (33.37%) Agile
4 281 (29.77%) DevOps
5 218 (23.09%) Event-Driven
6 207 (21.93%) Software Engineering
7 203 (21.50%) Observability
8 200 (21.19%) Containerisation
9 172 (18.22%) Problem-Solving
10 168 (17.80%) Data Pipeline
10 168 (17.80%) Infrastructure as Code
11 162 (17.16%) Analytics
12 155 (16.42%) Data Engineering
13 152 (16.10%) Data Modelling
14 146 (15.47%) ETL
15 143 (15.15%) Event-Driven Architecture
16 130 (13.77%) Test Automation
17 115 (12.18%) Full-Stack Development
18 103 (10.91%) Data Governance
19 95 (10.06%) Open Source
Programming Languages
1 440 (46.61%) Java
2 334 (35.38%) Python
3 269 (28.50%) SQL
4 125 (13.24%) Go
5 96 (10.17%) TypeScript
6 95 (10.06%) JavaScript
7 59 (6.25%) C#
8 44 (4.66%) Bash
9 34 (3.60%) Scala
10 18 (1.91%) C++
10 18 (1.91%) PowerShell
10 18 (1.91%) Rust
11 17 (1.80%) Shell Script
12 12 (1.27%) Bicep
13 9 (0.95%) PL/SQL
14 7 (0.74%) Perl
14 7 (0.74%) Search Processing Language
15 6 (0.64%) Groovy
16 5 (0.53%) Korn
17 4 (0.42%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 214 (22.67%) Security Cleared
2 174 (18.43%) SC Cleared
3 46 (4.87%) Degree
4 32 (3.39%) BPSS Clearance
5 22 (2.33%) Azure Certification
6 21 (2.22%) AWS Certification
7 18 (1.91%) Computer Science Degree
8 14 (1.48%) DV Cleared
9 13 (1.38%) Master's Degree
10 7 (0.74%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 7 (0.74%) SnowPro
11 4 (0.42%) OCP
11 4 (0.42%) Oracle Certification
12 3 (0.32%) AWS Certified Developer
12 3 (0.32%) ITIL Certification
12 3 (0.32%) TOGAF Certification
13 2 (0.21%) Microsoft Certification
14 1 (0.11%) MySQL Certification
14 1 (0.11%) PMI Certification
14 1 (0.11%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 112 (11.86%) Data Quality
2 47 (4.98%) GDPR
3 46 (4.87%) QA
4 22 (2.33%) Accessibility
5 13 (1.38%) ISO 20022
6 9 (0.95%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 9 (0.95%) NIST
7 8 (0.85%) NCSC
8 7 (0.74%) PCI DSS
9 5 (0.53%) SEPA
10 4 (0.42%) HL7
10 4 (0.42%) SLA
10 4 (0.42%) WCAG
11 3 (0.32%) ISO 8583
12 2 (0.21%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 2 (0.21%) ISO 15022
12 2 (0.21%) MiFID
12 2 (0.21%) PSD2
13 1 (0.11%) NIST 800
13 1 (0.11%) PMO
System Software
1 326 (34.53%) Docker
2 6 (0.64%) etcd
2 6 (0.64%) VMware Infrastructure
3 3 (0.32%) HDFS
4 2 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
5 1 (0.11%) Apache Flume
5 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 383 (40.57%) Kubernetes
2 214 (22.67%) Terraform
3 120 (12.71%) Prometheus
4 119 (12.61%) Grafana
5 59 (6.25%) Ansible
6 33 (3.50%) Argo
7 10 (1.06%) Fluentd
7 10 (1.06%) Istio
7 10 (1.06%) Kibana
8 9 (0.95%) Kiali
9 8 (0.85%) linkerd
9 8 (0.85%) logstash
9 8 (0.85%) Rancher
10 6 (0.64%) Progress Chef
10 6 (0.64%) Puppet
11 4 (0.42%) Podman
12 3 (0.32%) Packer
13 2 (0.21%) Amdocs OSS
13 2 (0.21%) QRadar
13 2 (0.21%) Sysdig
Vendors
1 90 (9.53%) Databricks
2 73 (7.73%) Splunk
3 72 (7.63%) Oracle
4 50 (5.30%) Microsoft
5 43 (4.56%) Google
6 37 (3.92%) Confluent
7 26 (2.75%) Informatica
8 23 (2.44%) IBM
9 15 (1.59%) Dynatrace
9 15 (1.59%) Red Hat
9 15 (1.59%) VMware
10 13 (1.38%) ServiceNow
11 12 (1.27%) Talend
12 10 (1.06%) Solace
13 9 (0.95%) AppDynamics
13 9 (0.95%) Denodo
13 9 (0.95%) Salesforce
13 9 (0.95%) Sybase
14 8 (0.85%) Cloudera
15 7 (0.74%) Pega