MLOps Contracts

MLOps
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring MLOps skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited MLOps over the 6 months leading up to 2 August 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
2 Aug 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 451 488 599
Rank change year-on-year +37 +111 +115
Contract jobs citing MLOps 116 79 72
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.35% 0.20% 0.13%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.39% 0.24% 0.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 88 65 51
10th Percentile £404 £442 £475
25th Percentile £500 £461 £563
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £600 £500 £600
Median % change year-on-year +20.00% -16.67% -4.00%
75th Percentile £728 £650 £731
90th Percentile £850 £800 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £515 £477 £575
% change year-on-year +8.08% -17.13% -18.73%

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

MLOps falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 29,972 33,531 47,751
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 90.41% 85.45% 89.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 18,760 21,562 32,735
10th Percentile £300 £310 £320
25th Percentile £404 £413 £430
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -4.55% -
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £734 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,662 1,890 1,565
10th Percentile £14.20 £14.00 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.30 £18.15 £18.57
Median hourly rate £25.15 £40.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -37.90% -4.71% +62.40%
75th Percentile £50.00 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £68.00 £74.59 £77.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.00 £41.25 £40.00
% change year-on-year -44.24% +3.13% +86.05%

MLOps
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Job vacancy trend for MLOps in the UK

MLOps
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

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

Daily rate trend for MLOps in the UK

MLOps
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing MLOps over the 6 months to 2 August 2025.

Daily rate histogram for MLOps in the UK

MLOps
Top 14 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing MLOps within the UK over the 6 months to 2 August 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 +68 100 £600 +9.09% 351
London +42 75 £650 +8.33% 293
Work from Home +46 44 £600 +22.26% 159
UK excluding London -5 28 £515 +8.08% 96
South East +29 11 £475 -5.00% 43
North of England -10 6 £450 -7.98% 22
Scotland -14 5 £535 +18.10% 13
South West +31 4 £515 +2.76% 7
North West -3 4 £475 -2.71% 16
West Midlands -6 1 £575 +4.55% 1
North East -7 1 £400 -19.19% 3
Midlands -9 1 £575 +4.55% 3
Yorkshire - 1 £425 - 3
Wales - 1 £675 - 2

MLOps
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 14 (12.07%) Apache Airflow
2 11 (9.48%) Apache Spark
3 2 (1.72%) Jupyter
4 1 (0.86%) Apache
4 1 (0.86%) Confluence
Applications
1 1 (0.86%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 49 (42.24%) Azure
2 48 (41.38%) AWS
3 29 (25.00%) GCP
4 15 (12.93%) Vertex AI
5 13 (11.21%) Amazon SageMaker
5 13 (11.21%) dbt
6 12 (10.34%) Azure DevOps
7 10 (8.62%) Azure Machine Learning
7 10 (8.62%) GitHub
8 9 (7.76%) Serverless
9 8 (6.90%) GitHub Actions
9 8 (6.90%) Snowflake
10 7 (6.03%) Amazon S3
10 7 (6.03%) AWS Lambda
11 6 (5.17%) Azure AI
11 6 (5.17%) Azure Data Factory
11 6 (5.17%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 5 (4.31%) Azure AKS
13 4 (3.45%) Google Kubernetes Engine
13 4 (3.45%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 3 (2.59%) DNS
2 1 (0.86%) Network Security
2 1 (0.86%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 16 (13.79%) Data Warehouse
2 15 (12.93%) Big Data
3 11 (9.48%) BigQuery
4 10 (8.62%) Data Lake
5 6 (5.17%) NoSQL
5 6 (5.17%) Redis
6 5 (4.31%) Amazon Redshift
7 4 (3.45%) Amazon Athena
7 4 (3.45%) Amazon RDS
8 3 (2.59%) Data Mining
9 2 (1.72%) DynamoDB
9 2 (1.72%) Flink
9 2 (1.72%) Hadoop
9 2 (1.72%) Metadata
10 1 (0.86%) Amazon QuickSight
10 1 (0.86%) Azure SQL Database
10 1 (0.86%) Data Vault
10 1 (0.86%) MongoDB
10 1 (0.86%) Parquet
10 1 (0.86%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 25 (21.55%) MLflow
2 13 (11.21%) Jenkins
3 6 (5.17%) Git
4 5 (4.31%) GitLab
5 3 (2.59%) Artifactory
5 3 (2.59%) JIRA
6 2 (1.72%) Bitbucket
7 1 (0.86%) Maven
General
1 41 (35.34%) Social Skills
2 23 (19.83%) Finance
3 13 (11.21%) Analytical Skills
4 10 (8.62%) Marketing
5 8 (6.90%) Advertising
5 8 (6.90%) Banking
6 7 (6.03%) Investment Banking
7 6 (5.17%) Front Office
7 6 (5.17%) Telecoms
8 4 (3.45%) Retail
9 2 (1.72%) Presentation Skills
10 1 (0.86%) Aerospace
10 1 (0.86%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 1 (0.86%) Influencing Skills
10 1 (0.86%) Legal
10 1 (0.86%) Pharmaceutical
10 1 (0.86%) Social Science
Job Titles
1 18 (15.52%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
2 16 (13.79%) Data Scientist
2 16 (13.79%) Machine Learning Engineer
3 14 (12.07%) Architect
4 10 (8.62%) Data Engineer
4 10 (8.62%) Lead
4 10 (8.62%) Senior
5 8 (6.90%) Product Manager
6 6 (5.17%) Azure Engineer
6 6 (5.17%) Solutions Architect
7 5 (4.31%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
7 5 (4.31%) AWS Engineer
7 5 (4.31%) Gen AI Engineer
8 4 (3.45%) Azure Data Engineer
8 4 (3.45%) DevOps Engineer
8 4 (3.45%) Python Engineer
9 3 (2.59%) Cloud Architect
9 3 (2.59%) GCP Engineer
9 3 (2.59%) Operations Engineer
9 3 (2.59%) Senior Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 30 (25.86%) PyTorch
2 27 (23.28%) TensorFlow
3 18 (15.52%) LangChain
3 18 (15.52%) scikit-learn
4 13 (11.21%) Hugging Face
4 13 (11.21%) Kafka
5 11 (9.48%) REST
6 8 (6.90%) Pandas
7 7 (6.03%) FastAPI
7 7 (6.03%) PySpark
8 6 (5.17%) Play Framework
9 5 (4.31%) OAuth
9 5 (4.31%) RESTful
10 4 (3.45%) Flask
10 4 (3.45%) LangGraph
10 4 (3.45%) NumPy
10 4 (3.45%) OAuth2
11 3 (2.59%) Google JAX
11 3 (2.59%) JAX
11 3 (2.59%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 18 (15.52%) Algorithms
1 18 (15.52%) Cloud Native
2 9 (7.76%) Distributed Systems
3 8 (6.90%) Digital Media
3 8 (6.90%) Marketing Technology
4 6 (5.17%) AI Agents
4 6 (5.17%) Greenfield Project
5 4 (3.45%) Distributed Computing
5 4 (3.45%) Public Cloud
6 3 (2.59%) Data Structures
6 3 (2.59%) Private Cloud
7 2 (1.72%) Life Science
7 2 (1.72%) Security Posture
8 1 (0.86%) Analytical Mindset
8 1 (0.86%) Data Fabric
8 1 (0.86%) Legacy Systems
8 1 (0.86%) Linux Command Line
8 1 (0.86%) Product Ownership
8 1 (0.86%) Virtual Team
8 1 (0.86%) Wiki
Operating Systems
1 1 (0.86%) Linux
1 1 (0.86%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 107 (92.24%) Machine Learning
2 83 (71.55%) Artificial Intelligence
3 65 (56.03%) CI/CD
4 57 (49.14%) Data Science
5 43 (37.07%) DevOps
6 41 (35.34%) Analytics
7 39 (33.62%) LLM
8 34 (29.31%) Generative AI
9 27 (23.28%) Data Engineering
10 25 (21.55%) Agile
11 24 (20.69%) Natural Language Processing
12 20 (17.24%) Data Pipeline
12 20 (17.24%) Deep Learning
13 19 (16.38%) Software Engineering
13 19 (16.38%) Use Case
14 18 (15.52%) Containerisation
14 18 (15.52%) Roadmaps
15 17 (14.66%) ETL
15 17 (14.66%) Problem-Solving
16 15 (12.93%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 83 (71.55%) Python
2 41 (35.34%) SQL
3 13 (11.21%) Scala
4 9 (7.76%) Java
5 5 (4.31%) C++
5 5 (4.31%) R
6 4 (3.45%) C
6 4 (3.45%) Clojure
6 4 (3.45%) Elixir
6 4 (3.45%) Rust
7 3 (2.59%) Bicep
7 3 (2.59%) TypeScript
8 2 (1.72%) Shell Script
9 1 (0.86%) Bash
9 1 (0.86%) C#
9 1 (0.86%) Go
9 1 (0.86%) JavaScript
9 1 (0.86%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 22 (18.97%) Degree
2 15 (12.93%) Master's Degree
3 11 (9.48%) Computer Science Degree
4 4 (3.45%) AWS Certification
4 4 (3.45%) SC Cleared
4 4 (3.45%) Security Cleared
5 3 (2.59%) PhD
6 2 (1.72%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
6 2 (1.72%) BPSS Clearance
6 2 (1.72%) CISSP
6 2 (1.72%) Postgraduate
7 1 (0.86%) Azure Certification
7 1 (0.86%) DV Cleared
7 1 (0.86%) SnowPro
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 7 (6.03%) GDPR
2 3 (2.59%) Data Quality
2 3 (2.59%) EU AI Act
2 3 (2.59%) NIST
3 2 (1.72%) California Consumer Privacy Act
3 2 (1.72%) HIPAA
3 2 (1.72%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 1 (0.86%) Accessibility
4 1 (0.86%) Disclosure Scotland
4 1 (0.86%) HL7
4 1 (0.86%) PCI DSS
4 1 (0.86%) QA
4 1 (0.86%) SLA
System Software
1 25 (21.55%) Docker
2 1 (0.86%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 34 (29.31%) Kubernetes
2 18 (15.52%) Terraform
3 16 (13.79%) Kubeflow
4 8 (6.90%) Grafana
5 5 (4.31%) Prometheus
6 4 (3.45%) Kustomize
7 3 (2.59%) Progress Chef
8 2 (1.72%) Ansible
9 1 (0.86%) Argo
9 1 (0.86%) Puppet
Vendors
1 24 (20.69%) Databricks
2 15 (12.93%) Microsoft
3 6 (5.17%) Google
4 5 (4.31%) OpenAI
5 2 (1.72%) IBM
5 2 (1.72%) NVIDIA
5 2 (1.72%) Palantir
6 1 (0.86%) Dataiku
6 1 (0.86%) DataRobot
6 1 (0.86%) Foundry
6 1 (0.86%) Informatica
6 1 (0.86%) Oracle
6 1 (0.86%) Rackspace
6 1 (0.86%) ServiceNow