Lead DevOps Engineer Contract Job Trends

Lead Development Operations Engineer
UK

The median Lead Development Operations Engineer daily rate in the UK is £575, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 13 December 2025.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 551 515 579
Rank change year-on-year -36 +64 +111
Contract jobs requiring a Lead DevOps Engineer 31 28 29
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.085% 0.078% 0.064%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.094% 0.085% 0.068%
Number of daily rates quoted 23 16 18
10th Percentile £500 £538 £525
25th Percentile £525 £550 £566
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £635 £625
Median % change year-on-year -9.45% +1.60% -10.71%
75th Percentile £625 £671 £709
90th Percentile £638 £726 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £531 £635 £700
% change year-on-year -16.34% -9.29% -6.67%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
UK

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in the UK with a recognized job title 32,988 33,120 42,501
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.93% 92.74% 93.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,924 20,243 28,641
10th Percentile £285 £300 £294
25th Percentile £403 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £645
90th Percentile £725 £738 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £495 £500
% change year-on-year -4.04% -1.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,924 1,136 1,517
10th Percentile £14.22 £15.36 £15.16
25th Percentile £17.87 £20.75 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £34.75 £44.00
Median % change year-on-year -27.63% -21.02% +40.98%
75th Percentile £56.81 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.75 £73.66 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £44.50
% change year-on-year -22.62% -26.97% +78.00%

Lead DevOps Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Lead DevOps Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Lead DevOps Engineer job vacancy trend in the UK

Lead DevOps Engineer
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Lead DevOps Engineer job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Lead DevOps Engineer job vacancies in the UK

Lead DevOps Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Lead DevOps Engineer over the 6 months to 13 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Lead DevOps Engineer in the UK

Lead DevOps Engineer
Top 10 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Lead DevOps Engineer within the UK over the 6 months to 13 December 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 -35 27 £588 -7.48% 7
London +3 11 £588 -21.14% 2
Work from Home -3 8 £556 -16.98% 6
UK excluding London -52 8 £531 -16.34% 5
West Midlands -25 4 £569 -1.09% 2
Midlands -31 4 £569 -1.09% 2
Yorkshire -40 4 £488 -25.00%
North of England -44 4 £488 -12.56%
North West -15 1 - -
South East -21 1 - - 2

Lead DevOps Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities

For the 6 months to 13 December 2025, Lead DevOps Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads featuring Lead DevOps Engineer in the job title.

1 31 (100.00%) DevOps
2 22 (70.97%) CI/CD
3 21 (67.74%) Terraform
4 19 (61.29%) Security Cleared
5 17 (54.84%) AWS
5 17 (54.84%) SC Cleared
6 15 (48.39%) Infrastructure as Code
7 14 (45.16%) Agile
7 14 (45.16%) Kubernetes
8 12 (38.71%) GitLab
9 11 (35.48%) GitHub
9 11 (35.48%) Kafka
9 11 (35.48%) Linux
10 10 (32.26%) Containerisation
10 10 (32.26%) Jenkins
10 10 (32.26%) Observability
10 10 (32.26%) Platform Engineering
10 10 (32.26%) Python
11 9 (29.03%) Amazon ECS
12 8 (25.81%) Ansible
12 8 (25.81%) Docker
12 8 (25.81%) Go
12 8 (25.81%) Unix
13 7 (22.58%) Azure
13 7 (22.58%) Bash
13 7 (22.58%) Packer
13 7 (22.58%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
14 6 (19.35%) Amazon RDS
14 6 (19.35%) AWS CloudFormation
14 6 (19.35%) AWS Fargate

Lead DevOps Engineer Skill Set
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:

Cloud Services
1 17 (54.84%) AWS
2 11 (35.48%) GitHub
3 9 (29.03%) Amazon ECS
4 7 (22.58%) Azure
5 6 (19.35%) AWS CloudFormation
5 6 (19.35%) AWS Fargate
5 6 (19.35%) Entra ID
5 6 (19.35%) Virtual Private Cloud
6 5 (16.13%) Amazon EC2
6 5 (16.13%) Amazon EKS
6 5 (16.13%) GitHub Actions
7 4 (12.90%) Azure DevOps
8 2 (6.45%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 2 (6.45%) Amazon SQS
8 2 (6.45%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 2 (6.45%) IBM Cloud
8 2 (6.45%) OpenShift
8 2 (6.45%) Power Platform
9 1 (3.23%) Amazon EMR
9 1 (3.23%) GCP
Communications & Networking
1 6 (19.35%) DNS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 6 (19.35%) Amazon RDS
1 6 (19.35%) MongoDB
2 2 (6.45%) Data Lake
2 2 (6.45%) Power BI
3 1 (3.23%) Amazon Athena
3 1 (3.23%) Amazon Redshift
3 1 (3.23%) Flink
Development Applications
1 12 (38.71%) GitLab
2 10 (32.26%) Jenkins
3 4 (12.90%) JIRA
3 4 (12.90%) Terragrunt
4 1 (3.23%) CircleCI
4 1 (3.23%) Git
General
1 11 (35.48%) Public Sector
2 9 (29.03%) Finance
3 3 (9.68%) Electronics
3 3 (9.68%) Manufacturing
3 3 (9.68%) Marketing
3 3 (9.68%) Telecoms
4 2 (6.45%) Banking
4 2 (6.45%) Social Skills
5 1 (3.23%) Front Office
5 1 (3.23%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 1 (3.23%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 11 (35.48%) Kafka
2 6 (19.35%) cloud-init
2 6 (19.35%) Keycloak
3 4 (12.90%) AWS CDK
4 3 (9.68%) SailPoint
5 2 (6.45%) .NET
5 2 (6.45%) Elastic Stack
6 1 (3.23%) React
6 1 (3.23%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 6 (19.35%) PKI
2 4 (12.90%) Legacy Applications
3 3 (9.68%) Cyber Defence
4 2 (6.45%) Cyber Threat
5 1 (3.23%) Cloud Native
5 1 (3.23%) Cyberattack
5 1 (3.23%) Legacy Systems
5 1 (3.23%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 11 (35.48%) Linux
2 8 (25.81%) Unix
3 7 (22.58%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 6 (19.35%) CentOS
5 2 (6.45%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 31 (100.00%) DevOps
2 22 (70.97%) CI/CD
3 15 (48.39%) Infrastructure as Code
4 14 (45.16%) Agile
5 10 (32.26%) Containerisation
5 10 (32.26%) Observability
5 10 (32.26%) Platform Engineering
6 6 (19.35%) Incident Response
6 6 (19.35%) Microservices
7 5 (16.13%) Business Intelligence
7 5 (16.13%) Continuous Integration
7 5 (16.13%) Roadmaps
8 4 (12.90%) Event-Driven
8 4 (12.90%) Event-Driven Architecture
8 4 (12.90%) Infrastructure Automation
8 4 (12.90%) Product Roadmap
8 4 (12.90%) Software Delivery
9 3 (9.68%) Identity Access Management
9 3 (9.68%) Site Reliability Engineering
9 3 (9.68%) Strategic Roadmap
Programming Languages
1 10 (32.26%) Python
2 8 (25.81%) Go
3 7 (22.58%) Bash
4 5 (16.13%) Java
5 4 (12.90%) Shell Script
6 1 (3.23%) JavaScript
6 1 (3.23%) Ruby
6 1 (3.23%) SQL
Qualifications
1 19 (61.29%) Security Cleared
2 17 (54.84%) SC Cleared
3 3 (9.68%) BPSS Clearance
4 2 (6.45%) AWS Certification
4 2 (6.45%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 6 (19.35%) NCSC
2 4 (12.90%) Accessibility
2 4 (12.90%) QA
3 2 (6.45%) PCI DSS
3 2 (6.45%) SOC 2
System Software
1 8 (25.81%) Docker
2 1 (3.23%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 21 (67.74%) Terraform
2 14 (45.16%) Kubernetes
3 8 (25.81%) Ansible
4 7 (22.58%) Packer
5 6 (19.35%) Jamf Pro
6 5 (16.13%) Argo
6 5 (16.13%) Grafana
6 5 (16.13%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 6 (19.35%) Okta
1 6 (19.35%) Splunk
2 4 (12.90%) Microsoft
3 3 (9.68%) SAP
4 2 (6.45%) IBM
4 2 (6.45%) InterSystems
4 2 (6.45%) Red Hat
4 2 (6.45%) ServiceNow
5 1 (3.23%) Dynatrace
5 1 (3.23%) VMware