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 1 May 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 107 164 139
Rank change year-on-year +57 -25 -41
Contract jobs citing Kafka 735 622 1,141
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 2.51% 1.43% 1.91%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 11.06% 6.95% 8.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 484 452 820
10th Percentile £400 £390 £463
25th Percentile £463 £456 £525
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £565 £536 £650
Median % change year-on-year +5.36% -17.50% +4.00%
75th Percentile £738 £675 £744
90th Percentile £838 £749 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £485 £538
% change year-on-year -2.06% -9.77% -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 6,644 8,946 13,890
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 22.70% 20.54% 23.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,558 6,207 10,141
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 £771 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -2.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 112 233 153
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 £74.89 £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 1 May 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 1 May 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 1 May 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 +60 614 £585 +6.36% 726
London +29 417 £650 +18.18% 341
Work from Home +71 276 £625 +8.70% 446
UK excluding London +90 220 £475 -2.06% 515
North of England +58 104 £525 +7.14% 106
North West +41 64 £500 -4.08% 62
Scotland +17 46 £470 - 42
Yorkshire +16 29 £675 +50.00% 31
South East +27 26 £509 +7.11% 168
Midlands +31 17 £399 +0.38% 89
East Midlands +19 12 £358 -9.94% 32
North East - 11 £465 - 13
Northern Ireland - 10 £470 - 17
South West +51 9 £513 -6.82% 50
East of England +35 9 £318 -46.97% 49
West Midlands +14 5 £550 +37.50% 50
Wales +1 1 - - 9

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
1 102 (13.88%) Apache Spark
2 86 (11.70%) Apache
3 53 (7.21%) Apache Airflow
4 25 (3.40%) Confluence
5 12 (1.63%) nginx
5 12 (1.63%) Traefik
6 11 (1.50%) Camunda
7 5 (0.68%) Alfresco
8 4 (0.54%) Oracle Coherence
8 4 (0.54%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 3 (0.41%) Cloud Foundry
9 3 (0.41%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.41%) SharePoint
10 2 (0.27%) GemFire
10 2 (0.27%) JBoss
10 2 (0.27%) MQSeries
11 1 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
11 1 (0.14%) Mule
11 1 (0.14%) Tomcat
11 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 2 (0.27%) Dynamics CRM
2 2 (0.27%) Magento
2 2 (0.27%) Oracle 11i
2 2 (0.27%) Oracle Retail
2 2 (0.27%) Payment Gateway
2 2 (0.27%) SAP CX
2 2 (0.27%) SAP ERP
2 2 (0.27%) SAP S/4HANA
2 2 (0.27%) Shopify
3 1 (0.14%) Distributed Ledger
3 1 (0.14%) Fidessa
3 1 (0.14%) ION Anvil
3 1 (0.14%) ION MarketView
3 1 (0.14%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 372 (50.61%) AWS
2 137 (18.64%) Azure
3 94 (12.79%) Serverless
4 77 (10.48%) AWS Lambda
5 62 (8.44%) GCP
6 56 (7.62%) Amazon ECS
6 56 (7.62%) Amazon S3
6 56 (7.62%) GitHub
6 56 (7.62%) OpenShift
7 49 (6.67%) dbt
8 35 (4.76%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 34 (4.63%) Snowflake
10 32 (4.35%) Azure DevOps
10 32 (4.35%) Entra ID
10 32 (4.35%) GitHub Actions
11 27 (3.67%) AWS CloudFormation
12 23 (3.13%) Azure AKS
13 20 (2.72%) Amazon Kinesis
14 19 (2.59%) AWS Fargate
15 18 (2.45%) Amazon EMR
Communications & Networking
1 21 (2.86%) 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 (22.86%) MongoDB
2 158 (21.50%) PostgreSQL
3 114 (15.51%) Relational Database
4 102 (13.88%) NoSQL
5 55 (7.48%) Apache Cassandra
6 52 (7.07%) Big Data
7 49 (6.67%) Data Warehouse
8 42 (5.71%) DB2
9 41 (5.58%) Redis
10 39 (5.31%) Flink
10 39 (5.31%) MySQL
11 38 (5.17%) Amazon Athena
12 36 (4.90%) Hadoop
13 35 (4.76%) Apache Iceberg
14 34 (4.63%) Data Lake
14 34 (4.63%) SQL Server
15 31 (4.22%) Apache Ignite
16 30 (4.08%) Dremio
17 28 (3.81%) Apache Arrow
18 26 (3.54%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 123 (16.73%) Jenkins
2 97 (13.20%) JUnit
3 62 (8.44%) GitLab
4 50 (6.80%) Git
5 48 (6.53%) Gradle
6 41 (5.58%) JIRA
6 41 (5.58%) Mockito
7 39 (5.31%) Artifactory
8 36 (4.90%) Liquibase
9 27 (3.67%) Maven
10 17 (2.31%) SonarQube
11 13 (1.77%) Bitbucket
12 12 (1.63%) Selenium
13 11 (1.50%) Sonatype Nexus
14 10 (1.36%) Postman
15 9 (1.22%) IntelliJ
15 9 (1.22%) JMeter
15 9 (1.22%) Subversion
16 8 (1.09%) Cucumber
17 7 (0.95%) TeamCity
General
1 216 (29.39%) Finance
2 167 (22.72%) Social Skills
3 108 (14.69%) Banking
4 106 (14.42%) Analytical Skills
5 105 (14.29%) Public Sector
6 70 (9.52%) Front Office
7 53 (7.21%) Investment Banking
8 24 (3.27%) Marketing
9 23 (3.13%) Telecoms
10 21 (2.86%) Electronics
10 21 (2.86%) Manufacturing
11 19 (2.59%) Retail
12 15 (2.04%) Presentation Skills
13 10 (1.36%) Back Office
13 10 (1.36%) Financial Institution
14 8 (1.09%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 7 (0.95%) Organisational Skills
16 5 (0.68%) Law
16 5 (0.68%) Military
17 4 (0.54%) Documentation Skills
Job Titles
1 282 (38.37%) Developer
2 159 (21.63%) Java Developer
3 124 (16.87%) Senior
4 107 (14.56%) Data Engineer
5 87 (11.84%) Architect
6 66 (8.98%) Lead
7 63 (8.57%) DevOps Engineer
8 55 (7.48%) AWS Engineer
8 55 (7.48%) Senior Developer
9 51 (6.94%) Python Engineer
10 42 (5.71%) SC Cleared Java Developer
11 39 (5.31%) Software Engineer
12 37 (5.03%) AWS DevOps
12 37 (5.03%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 36 (4.90%) Senior Java Developer
14 34 (4.63%) C# Developer
15 30 (4.08%) Data Architect
15 30 (4.08%) Full-Stack Developer
16 27 (3.67%) Java Engineer
17 24 (3.27%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 165 (22.45%) Spring
2 139 (18.91%) Spring Boot
3 98 (13.33%) React
4 51 (6.94%) .NET
4 51 (6.94%) REST
5 50 (6.80%) PySpark
6 48 (6.53%) RESTful
7 47 (6.39%) Swagger
8 45 (6.12%) gRPC
9 43 (5.85%) J2EE
10 42 (5.71%) OpenAPI
11 39 (5.31%) AngularJS
11 39 (5.31%) RabbitMQ
12 37 (5.03%) JMS
13 35 (4.76%) Web Services
14 31 (4.22%) ASP.NET
15 30 (4.08%) HTML
16 29 (3.95%) .NET Core
16 29 (3.95%) OAuth
17 28 (3.81%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 73 (9.93%) Distributed Systems
2 49 (6.67%) Data Structures
3 39 (5.31%) Equities
4 37 (5.03%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 31 (4.22%) 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 (1.50%) 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
1 101 (13.74%) Linux
2 40 (5.44%) Unix
3 27 (3.67%) Windows
4 21 (2.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 16 (2.18%) 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
1 292 (39.73%) Agile
2 274 (37.28%) DevOps
3 246 (33.47%) Microservices
4 244 (33.20%) CI/CD
5 177 (24.08%) Software Engineering
6 144 (19.59%) Problem-Solving
7 127 (17.28%) Containerisation
8 121 (16.46%) Open Source
9 101 (13.74%) Analytics
10 98 (13.33%) Event-Driven
11 89 (12.11%) TDD
12 88 (11.97%) Data Pipeline
13 81 (11.02%) Data Engineering
14 77 (10.48%) Test Automation
15 69 (9.39%) ETL
16 64 (8.71%) Event-Driven Architecture
17 62 (8.44%) SDLC
18 61 (8.30%) Infrastructure as Code
18 61 (8.30%) Mentoring
19 59 (8.03%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 351 (47.76%) Java
2 262 (35.65%) Python
3 261 (35.51%) SQL
4 98 (13.33%) Go
5 75 (10.20%) JavaScript
6 63 (8.57%) C#
7 62 (8.44%) TypeScript
8 47 (6.39%) Shell Script
9 35 (4.76%) C++
10 30 (4.08%) Bash
11 25 (3.40%) Scala
12 14 (1.90%) PL/SQL
13 10 (1.36%) Perl
14 9 (1.22%) Groovy
14 9 (1.22%) PHP
15 7 (0.95%) Kotlin
16 6 (0.82%) Clojure
17 5 (0.68%) PowerShell
18 4 (0.54%) R
18 4 (0.54%) Rust
Qualifications
1 187 (25.44%) Security Cleared
2 176 (23.95%) SC Cleared
3 40 (5.44%) Degree
4 30 (4.08%) AWS Certification
5 16 (2.18%) AWS Certified Developer
5 16 (2.18%) Computer Science Degree
6 10 (1.36%) Numerate Degree
7 9 (1.22%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 9 (1.22%) DV Cleared
8 5 (0.68%) 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 (4.63%) Data Quality
2 19 (2.59%) QA
3 17 (2.31%) GDPR
4 16 (2.18%) 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 (32.11%) Docker
2 12 (1.63%) VMware Infrastructure
3 11 (1.50%) 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
1 297 (40.41%) Kubernetes
2 167 (22.72%) Terraform
3 56 (7.62%) Prometheus
4 49 (6.67%) Grafana
5 32 (4.35%) Istio
6 26 (3.54%) Ansible
7 20 (2.72%) Packer
8 16 (2.18%) 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%) Kibana
15 6 (0.82%) Argo
16 5 (0.68%) Control-M
17 3 (0.41%) Trend Micro Deep Security
Vendors
1 85 (11.56%) Oracle
2 42 (5.71%) Splunk
3 38 (5.17%) Sybase
4 32 (4.35%) SAP
5 25 (3.40%) Google
6 23 (3.13%) Confluent
6 23 (3.13%) Databricks
7 20 (2.72%) 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
11 12 (1.63%) ServiceNow
12 11 (1.50%) MuleSoft
13 10 (1.36%) Salesforce
14 9 (1.22%) Dynatrace
15 8 (1.09%) CA Agile Central
15 8 (1.09%) Cloudera
15 8 (1.09%) Red Hat