Kafka Contracts

Apache Kafka
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring Kafka skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Kafka over the 6 months leading up to 30 April 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Apr 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 105 170 139
Rank change year-on-year +65 -31 -42
Contract jobs citing Kafka 736 628 1,140
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 2.52% 1.44% 1.91%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 11.10% 7.01% 8.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 486 459 819
10th Percentile £400 £380 £463
25th Percentile £463 £456 £525
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £563 £534 £650
Median % change year-on-year +5.34% -17.85% +4.00%
75th Percentile £738 £675 £746
90th Percentile £838 £745 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £482 £538
% change year-on-year -1.45% -10.33% -2.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 6 8
10th Percentile £51.09 £22.24 £71.85
25th Percentile £68.84 £23.81 £75.00
Median hourly rate £85.60 £31.50 £76.50
Median % change year-on-year +171.75% -58.82% -1.29%
75th Percentile £93.75 £38.94 £81.00
90th Percentile - £54.50 £90.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £78.70 £31.50 £78.00
% change year-on-year +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 6,629 8,962 13,891
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 22.67% 20.56% 23.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,551 6,219 10,140
10th Percentile £363 £338 £400
25th Percentile £425 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £530 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.94% -3.64% -
75th Percentile £650 £650 £675
90th Percentile £780 £769 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -2.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 112 231 153
10th Percentile £27.14 £21.25 £31.60
25th Percentile £48.25 £40.00 £48.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £46.18 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +40.75% -28.95% +32.65%
75th Percentile £68.75 £65.00 £75.00
90th Percentile £82.87 £75.00 £80.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £47.50 £64.00
% change year-on-year +36.84% -25.78% +30.61%

Kafka
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Kafka as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Kafka.

Daily rate trend for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Kafka over the 6 months to 30 April 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Kafka.

Hourly rate trend for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Kafka over the 6 months to 30 April 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
Top 17 Contract 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 30 April 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
England +64 616 £585 +6.85% 436
London +40 420 £650 +18.18% 260
Work from Home +79 277 £625 +8.70% 312
UK excluding London +85 218 £475 -1.45% 211
North of England +61 103 £525 +6.65% 59
North West +35 64 £500 -4.31% 42
Scotland +13 45 £470 +2.17% 30
Yorkshire +22 28 £675 +50.00% 11
South East +24 26 £509 +7.11% 44
Midlands +32 17 £399 +12.39% 34
East Midlands +19 12 £358 -9.94% 12
North East - 11 £465 - 6
Northern Ireland - 10 £470 - 13
South West +50 9 £513 -6.82% 20
East of England +37 9 £318 -34.73% 11
West Midlands +15 5 £550 +76.00% 22
Wales +5 1 - - 2

Kafka
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 101 (13.72%) Apache Spark
2 85 (11.55%) Apache
3 53 (7.20%) Apache Airflow
4 25 (3.40%) Confluence
5 12 (1.63%) nginx
5 12 (1.63%) Traefik
6 10 (1.36%) Camunda
7 4 (0.54%) Alfresco
7 4 (0.54%) Oracle Coherence
7 4 (0.54%) Oracle SOA Suite
8 3 (0.41%) Cloud Foundry
8 3 (0.41%) Jupyter
8 3 (0.41%) SharePoint
9 2 (0.27%) GemFire
9 2 (0.27%) JBoss
9 2 (0.27%) MQSeries
10 1 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
10 1 (0.14%) Mule
10 1 (0.14%) Tomcat
10 1 (0.14%) WebSphere
Applications
1 6 (0.82%) MS Visio
2 4 (0.54%) Microsoft Excel
3 2 (0.27%) Microsoft Project
4 1 (0.14%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 4 (0.54%) Endur
1 4 (0.54%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
2 3 (0.41%) SAP ERP
3 2 (0.27%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.27%) Magento
3 2 (0.27%) Oracle 11i
3 2 (0.27%) Oracle Retail
3 2 (0.27%) Payment Gateway
3 2 (0.27%) SAP CX
3 2 (0.27%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (0.27%) Shopify
4 1 (0.14%) Distributed Ledger
4 1 (0.14%) Fidessa
4 1 (0.14%) ION Anvil
4 1 (0.14%) ION MarketView
4 1 (0.14%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 375 (50.95%) AWS
2 137 (18.61%) Azure
3 94 (12.77%) Serverless
4 77 (10.46%) AWS Lambda
5 61 (8.29%) GCP
6 57 (7.74%) GitHub
7 56 (7.61%) Amazon ECS
7 56 (7.61%) OpenShift
8 55 (7.47%) Amazon S3
9 49 (6.66%) dbt
10 35 (4.76%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 34 (4.62%) Snowflake
12 33 (4.48%) GitHub Actions
13 32 (4.35%) Azure DevOps
13 32 (4.35%) Entra ID
14 27 (3.67%) AWS CloudFormation
15 23 (3.13%) Azure AKS
16 20 (2.72%) Amazon Kinesis
17 19 (2.58%) AWS Fargate
18 18 (2.45%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 21 (2.85%) DNS
2 14 (1.90%) TCP/IP
3 6 (0.82%) HTTP
3 6 (0.82%) SSL
4 4 (0.54%) NAS
4 4 (0.54%) SAN
5 3 (0.41%) Cisco ISE
5 3 (0.41%) SMS
5 3 (0.41%) SSH
6 2 (0.27%) Firewall
7 1 (0.14%) Kerberos
7 1 (0.14%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 168 (22.83%) MongoDB
2 158 (21.47%) PostgreSQL
3 114 (15.49%) Relational Database
4 102 (13.86%) NoSQL
5 55 (7.47%) Apache Cassandra
6 52 (7.07%) Big Data
7 49 (6.66%) Data Warehouse
8 42 (5.71%) DB2
9 40 (5.43%) Redis
10 38 (5.16%) Amazon Athena
10 38 (5.16%) Flink
10 38 (5.16%) MySQL
11 36 (4.89%) Hadoop
12 35 (4.76%) Apache Iceberg
12 35 (4.76%) SQL Server
13 34 (4.62%) Data Lake
14 31 (4.21%) Apache Ignite
15 30 (4.08%) Dremio
16 28 (3.80%) Apache Arrow
17 26 (3.53%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 122 (16.58%) Jenkins
2 96 (13.04%) JUnit
3 63 (8.56%) GitLab
4 51 (6.93%) Git
5 47 (6.39%) Gradle
6 41 (5.57%) JIRA
7 40 (5.43%) Mockito
8 39 (5.30%) Artifactory
9 35 (4.76%) Liquibase
10 27 (3.67%) Maven
11 17 (2.31%) SonarQube
12 13 (1.77%) Bitbucket
13 12 (1.63%) Selenium
14 11 (1.49%) Sonatype Nexus
15 10 (1.36%) Postman
16 9 (1.22%) IntelliJ
16 9 (1.22%) JMeter
16 9 (1.22%) Subversion
17 8 (1.09%) Cucumber
18 7 (0.95%) TeamCity
General
1 217 (29.48%) Finance
2 167 (22.69%) Social Skills
3 108 (14.67%) Banking
4 106 (14.40%) Analytical Skills
4 106 (14.40%) Public Sector
5 70 (9.51%) Front Office
6 53 (7.20%) Investment Banking
7 24 (3.26%) Marketing
8 23 (3.13%) Telecoms
9 21 (2.85%) Electronics
9 21 (2.85%) Manufacturing
10 20 (2.72%) Retail
11 15 (2.04%) Presentation Skills
12 10 (1.36%) Back Office
12 10 (1.36%) Financial Institution
13 8 (1.09%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 7 (0.95%) Organisational Skills
15 5 (0.68%) Law
15 5 (0.68%) Military
16 4 (0.54%) Documentation Skills
Job Titles
1 280 (38.04%) Developer
2 158 (21.47%) Java Developer
3 123 (16.71%) Senior
4 107 (14.54%) Data Engineer
5 87 (11.82%) Architect
6 67 (9.10%) Lead
7 63 (8.56%) DevOps Engineer
8 55 (7.47%) AWS Engineer
9 54 (7.34%) Senior Developer
10 51 (6.93%) Python Engineer
11 41 (5.57%) SC Cleared Java Developer
12 39 (5.30%) Software Engineer
13 37 (5.03%) AWS DevOps
13 37 (5.03%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 36 (4.89%) Senior Java Developer
15 34 (4.62%) C# Developer
16 30 (4.08%) Data Architect
17 29 (3.94%) Full-Stack Developer
18 27 (3.67%) Java Engineer
19 25 (3.40%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 166 (22.55%) Spring
2 140 (19.02%) Spring Boot
3 98 (13.32%) React
4 53 (7.20%) .NET
5 50 (6.79%) PySpark
5 50 (6.79%) REST
6 48 (6.52%) RESTful
7 46 (6.25%) Swagger
8 45 (6.11%) gRPC
9 43 (5.84%) J2EE
10 41 (5.57%) OpenAPI
11 39 (5.30%) RabbitMQ
12 38 (5.16%) AngularJS
13 37 (5.03%) JMS
14 35 (4.76%) Web Services
15 31 (4.21%) ASP.NET
16 29 (3.94%) .NET Core
16 29 (3.94%) HTML
16 29 (3.94%) Node.js
16 29 (3.94%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 73 (9.92%) Distributed Systems
2 49 (6.66%) Data Structures
3 39 (5.30%) Equities
4 37 (5.03%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 33 (4.48%) Cloud Native
6 23 (3.13%) PKI
7 18 (2.45%) Legacy Applications
7 18 (2.45%) Management Information System
8 14 (1.90%) Public Cloud
9 13 (1.77%) Derivative
9 13 (1.77%) Enterprise Software
10 12 (1.63%) Product Ownership
11 11 (1.49%) Algorithms
12 10 (1.36%) Replication
13 9 (1.22%) Legacy Systems
14 8 (1.09%) Data Centre
14 8 (1.09%) Market Risk
15 6 (0.82%) Equity Derivative
15 6 (0.82%) Greenfield Project
16 5 (0.68%) Hybrid Cloud
Operating Systems
1 100 (13.59%) Linux
2 40 (5.43%) Unix
3 27 (3.67%) Windows
4 21 (2.85%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 16 (2.17%) CentOS
6 3 (0.41%) AIX
7 2 (0.27%) Mac OS
8 1 (0.14%) Debian
8 1 (0.14%) Ubuntu
8 1 (0.14%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 294 (39.95%) Agile
2 273 (37.09%) DevOps
3 246 (33.42%) Microservices
4 245 (33.29%) CI/CD
5 177 (24.05%) Software Engineering
6 144 (19.57%) Problem-Solving
7 127 (17.26%) Containerisation
8 121 (16.44%) Open Source
9 101 (13.72%) Analytics
10 98 (13.32%) Event-Driven
11 88 (11.96%) TDD
12 87 (11.82%) Data Pipeline
13 81 (11.01%) Data Engineering
14 77 (10.46%) Test Automation
15 69 (9.38%) ETL
16 65 (8.83%) Event-Driven Architecture
17 63 (8.56%) SDLC
18 62 (8.42%) Infrastructure as Code
19 60 (8.15%) Mentoring
20 59 (8.02%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 352 (47.83%) Java
2 262 (35.60%) Python
2 262 (35.60%) SQL
3 98 (13.32%) Go
4 76 (10.33%) JavaScript
5 63 (8.56%) C#
6 61 (8.29%) TypeScript
7 47 (6.39%) Shell Script
8 35 (4.76%) C++
9 30 (4.08%) Bash
10 25 (3.40%) Scala
11 14 (1.90%) PL/SQL
12 10 (1.36%) Perl
13 9 (1.22%) Groovy
13 9 (1.22%) PHP
14 7 (0.95%) Kotlin
15 6 (0.82%) Clojure
16 5 (0.68%) PowerShell
17 4 (0.54%) R
17 4 (0.54%) Rust
Qualifications
1 187 (25.41%) Security Cleared
2 176 (23.91%) SC Cleared
3 42 (5.71%) Degree
4 32 (4.35%) AWS Certification
5 18 (2.45%) Computer Science Degree
6 16 (2.17%) AWS Certified Developer
7 10 (1.36%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 10 (1.36%) Numerate Degree
8 9 (1.22%) DV Cleared
9 4 (0.54%) BPSS Clearance
9 4 (0.54%) Master's Degree
10 3 (0.41%) Azure Certification
11 2 (0.27%) CISSP
12 1 (0.14%) DBS Check
12 1 (0.14%) ISTQB
12 1 (0.14%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 34 (4.62%) Data Quality
2 19 (2.58%) QA
3 17 (2.31%) GDPR
4 16 (2.17%) NCSC
5 9 (1.22%) Def Stans
6 8 (1.09%) Accessibility
6 8 (1.09%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 6 (0.82%) Disclosure Scotland
8 5 (0.68%) PCI DSS
9 4 (0.54%) EMIR
9 4 (0.54%) MiFID
10 3 (0.41%) WCAG
11 2 (0.27%) HIPAA
11 2 (0.27%) SEPA
12 1 (0.14%) ISO 20022
12 1 (0.14%) ISO/IEC 27001
System Software
1 236 (32.07%) Docker
2 12 (1.63%) VMware Infrastructure
3 10 (1.36%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 4 (0.54%) HDFS
5 2 (0.27%) Active Directory
6 1 (0.14%) Apache Flume
6 1 (0.14%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 298 (40.49%) Kubernetes
2 167 (22.69%) Terraform
3 57 (7.74%) Prometheus
4 50 (6.79%) Grafana
5 33 (4.48%) Istio
6 25 (3.40%) Ansible
7 20 (2.72%) Packer
8 16 (2.17%) Rancher
9 15 (2.04%) linkerd
10 14 (1.90%) Consul
10 14 (1.90%) Jamf Pro
10 14 (1.90%) Progress Chef
10 14 (1.90%) ZABBIX
11 13 (1.77%) HAProxy
12 12 (1.63%) Puppet
13 8 (1.09%) logstash
14 7 (0.95%) Argo
14 7 (0.95%) Kibana
15 5 (0.68%) Control-M
16 3 (0.41%) Trend Micro Deep Security
Vendors
1 87 (11.82%) Oracle
2 42 (5.71%) Splunk
3 38 (5.16%) Sybase
4 34 (4.62%) SAP
5 25 (3.40%) Google
6 23 (3.13%) Confluent
6 23 (3.13%) Databricks
7 21 (2.85%) Microsoft
8 17 (2.31%) IBM
9 15 (2.04%) VMware
10 14 (1.90%) Okta
11 12 (1.63%) Apple
11 12 (1.63%) ESET
12 11 (1.49%) MuleSoft
12 11 (1.49%) Salesforce
12 11 (1.49%) ServiceNow
13 9 (1.22%) Dynatrace
14 8 (1.09%) CA Agile Central
14 8 (1.09%) Cloudera
14 8 (1.09%) Red Hat