Distributed Systems Contracts with Hybrid/Remote/WFH Options

Distributed Systems
UK > Work from Home

The table below looks at the prevalence of the term Distributed Systems in remote or hybrid contract work. Included is a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Distributed Systems 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 242 257 321
Rank change year-on-year +15 +64 +100
Contract jobs citing Distributed Systems 62 88 159
As % of all contract jobs with a WFH option 0.63% 0.57% 0.61%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 1.89% 2.00% 1.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 34 72 109
10th Percentile £354 £400 £465
25th Percentile £472 £450 £525
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £563 £628 £625
Median % change year-on-year -10.28% +0.40% -
75th Percentile £705 £710 £750
90th Percentile £775 £725 £863
UK median daily rate £600 £588 £625
% change year-on-year +2.13% -6.00% +4.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 4
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £91.25 - £79.89
Median hourly rate £92.50 - £84.09
75th Percentile £93.75 - £88.30
90th Percentile - - -
UK median hourly rate £55.50 £55.00 £84.09
% change year-on-year +0.91% -34.59% +40.15%

All Generic Skills
Work from Home

Distributed Systems falls under the General and Transferable Skills category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies with remote or hybrid options requiring generic IT skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for generic IT skills 3,272 4,408 8,138
As % of all contract jobs with a WFH option 33.03% 28.73% 31.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,222 2,974 5,725
10th Percentile £350 £325 £363
25th Percentile £425 £431 £454
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £545 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.91% - +2.33%
75th Percentile £680 £675 £688
90th Percentile £825 £800 £800
UK median daily rate £525 £538 £550
% change year-on-year -2.33% -2.27% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 76 199 151
10th Percentile £18.75 £15.48 £19.00
25th Percentile £26.25 £25.50 £31.38
Median hourly rate £41.75 £51.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year -18.14% -11.30% +29.21%
75th Percentile £64.57 £65.02 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.13 £72.50 £85.00
UK median hourly rate £32.05 £30.00 £22.49
% change year-on-year +6.83% +33.42% -18.24%

Distributed Systems
Trend for Jobs with a WFH Option

Job vacancies with remote working options citing Distributed Systems as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Distributed Systems trend for jobs with Hybrid/Remote/WFH options

Distributed Systems
Daily Rate Trend for Jobs with a WFH Option

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in job vacancies with remote working options citing Distributed Systems.

Distributed Systems daily rate for jobs with a WFH option

Distributed Systems
Daily Rate Histogram for Jobs with a WFH Option

Daily rate distribution for jobs with remote working options citing Distributed Systems over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Distributed Systems daily rate histogram for jobs with a WFH option

Distributed Systems
Hourly Rate Trend for Jobs with a WFH Option

3-month moving average hourly rate quoted in job vacancies with remote working options citing Distributed Systems.

Distributed Systems hourly rate for jobs with a WFH option

Distributed Systems
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities with WFH Options 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 7 (11.29%) Apache
2 4 (6.45%) nginx
2 4 (6.45%) OpenStack
2 4 (6.45%) Oracle Coherence
3 3 (4.84%) Apache Spark
3 3 (4.84%) Confluence
3 3 (4.84%) SharePoint
4 1 (1.61%) DataSynapse
4 1 (1.61%) Ethereum
4 1 (1.61%) Hyperledger
4 1 (1.61%) MetaMask
Applications
1 3 (4.84%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 1 (1.61%) R3 Corda
Cloud Services
1 18 (29.03%) Azure
2 15 (24.19%) AWS
2 15 (24.19%) Cloud Computing
3 7 (11.29%) Azure DevOps
4 6 (9.68%) GCP
5 5 (8.06%) Azure Monitor
5 5 (8.06%) GitHub
6 4 (6.45%) Amazon S3
6 4 (6.45%) Azure Sentinel
6 4 (6.45%) Serverless
7 3 (4.84%) Amazon EC2
7 3 (4.84%) Amazon SageMaker
7 3 (4.84%) AWS Lambda
7 3 (4.84%) Azure Data Factory
7 3 (4.84%) Power Platform
8 2 (3.23%) Amazon ECS
8 2 (3.23%) Azure AKS
8 2 (3.23%) Azure Machine Learning
8 2 (3.23%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 2 (3.23%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 8 (12.90%) HTTP
2 5 (8.06%) DNS
3 4 (6.45%) FTP
3 4 (6.45%) SMTP
3 4 (6.45%) SSL
3 4 (6.45%) TCP/IP
4 3 (4.84%) Firewall
5 1 (1.61%) MQTT
5 1 (1.61%) Network Security
5 1 (1.61%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 7 (11.29%) NoSQL
2 5 (8.06%) Big Data
2 5 (8.06%) Data Warehouse
2 5 (8.06%) PostgreSQL
2 5 (8.06%) Redis
3 4 (6.45%) Apache Cassandra
3 4 (6.45%) Data Lake
3 4 (6.45%) MongoDB
4 3 (4.84%) Amazon RDS
4 3 (4.84%) Oracle Database
4 3 (4.84%) Power BI
5 2 (3.23%) BigQuery
5 2 (3.23%) Hadoop
5 2 (3.23%) Relational Database
6 1 (1.61%) Amazon Redshift
6 1 (1.61%) DB2
6 1 (1.61%) Elasticsearch
6 1 (1.61%) Flink
6 1 (1.61%) MySQL
6 1 (1.61%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 10 (16.13%) Git
2 9 (14.52%) Jenkins
3 6 (9.68%) JIRA
4 5 (8.06%) Visual Studio
5 3 (4.84%) Atlassian Bamboo
5 3 (4.84%) JUnit
5 3 (4.84%) MLflow
6 2 (3.23%) Cypress.io
6 2 (3.23%) Maven
6 2 (3.23%) Mockito
6 2 (3.23%) Postman
6 2 (3.23%) REST Assured
6 2 (3.23%) SoapUI
6 2 (3.23%) SonarQube
6 2 (3.23%) Subversion
6 2 (3.23%) Xcode
6 2 (3.23%) XCTest
7 1 (1.61%) Mocha
7 1 (1.61%) TeamCity
7 1 (1.61%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 26 (41.94%) Social Skills
2 21 (33.87%) Finance
3 15 (24.19%) Banking
4 11 (17.74%) Investment Banking
5 7 (11.29%) Analytical Skills
6 3 (4.84%) Documentation Skills
6 3 (4.84%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 3 (4.84%) Public Sector
7 2 (3.23%) Financial Institution
7 2 (3.23%) Front Office
8 1 (1.61%) Games
8 1 (1.61%) Influencing Skills
8 1 (1.61%) Retail
Job Titles
1 17 (27.42%) Developer
2 9 (14.52%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
3 8 (12.90%) JavaScript Engineer
3 8 (12.90%) Python Engineer
4 7 (11.29%) Senior
4 7 (11.29%) Site Reliability Engineer
5 6 (9.68%) Java Developer
5 6 (9.68%) Site Engineer
5 6 (9.68%) Software Engineer
6 5 (8.06%) C# Developer
6 5 (8.06%) Data Engineer
7 4 (6.45%) Algorithm Engineer
7 4 (6.45%) Automation Engineer
7 4 (6.45%) C++ Software Engineer
7 4 (6.45%) Software Engineer - Algorithmic Trading
7 4 (6.45%) Unix Engineer
8 3 (4.84%) Agile C# Developer
8 3 (4.84%) Agile Developer
8 3 (4.84%) Architect
8 3 (4.84%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 18 (29.03%) Kafka
2 9 (14.52%) Spring
3 7 (11.29%) REST
4 6 (9.68%) RESTful
5 5 (8.06%) .NET
5 5 (8.06%) AngularJS
5 5 (8.06%) Elastic Stack
5 5 (8.06%) Spring Boot
5 5 (8.06%) YAML
6 4 (6.45%) JSON
7 3 (4.84%) OpenTelemetry
7 3 (4.84%) PyTorch
7 3 (4.84%) React
7 3 (4.84%) SOAP
7 3 (4.84%) Swagger
7 3 (4.84%) TensorFlow
7 3 (4.84%) Web Services
8 2 (3.23%) JWT
8 2 (3.23%) Material-UI
8 2 (3.23%) scikit-learn
Miscellaneous
1 9 (14.52%) Management Information System
2 7 (11.29%) Algorithms
3 6 (9.68%) Cloud Native
3 6 (9.68%) Data Structures
4 4 (6.45%) Hedge funds
5 3 (4.84%) Cyber Threat
6 2 (3.23%) Data Protection Act
6 2 (3.23%) Distributed Computing
6 2 (3.23%) Equities
6 2 (3.23%) Public Cloud
7 1 (1.61%) CMDB
7 1 (1.61%) Distributed Architecture
7 1 (1.61%) Enterprise Software
7 1 (1.61%) Fixed Income
7 1 (1.61%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
7 1 (1.61%) Grid Computing
7 1 (1.61%) Legacy Code
7 1 (1.61%) Mainframe
7 1 (1.61%) Onboarding
7 1 (1.61%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 11 (17.74%) Linux
2 7 (11.29%) Unix
3 1 (1.61%) Windows
3 1 (1.61%) Windows Server
3 1 (1.61%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 25 (40.32%) CI/CD
1 25 (40.32%) Problem-Solving
2 24 (38.71%) Agile
3 21 (33.87%) DevOps
4 18 (29.03%) Microservices
5 17 (27.42%) Artificial Intelligence
6 15 (24.19%) Machine Learning
7 14 (22.58%) Critical Thinking
8 13 (20.97%) Scrum
8 13 (20.97%) Site Reliability Engineering
9 12 (19.35%) Data Science
10 11 (17.74%) Containerisation
11 10 (16.13%) Data Security
11 10 (16.13%) High Availability
11 10 (16.13%) SDLC
11 10 (16.13%) Software Engineering
12 9 (14.52%) Decision-Making
12 9 (14.52%) Mentoring
12 9 (14.52%) Risk Management
12 9 (14.52%) Task Automation
Programming Languages
1 35 (56.45%) Python
2 30 (48.39%) Java
3 21 (33.87%) SQL
4 12 (19.35%) JavaScript
5 11 (17.74%) C#
5 11 (17.74%) TypeScript
6 9 (14.52%) Shell Script
7 7 (11.29%) PowerShell
8 6 (9.68%) C++
8 6 (9.68%) Groovy
9 5 (8.06%) Go
10 3 (4.84%) Bicep
10 3 (4.84%) Perl
10 3 (4.84%) Rust
11 2 (3.23%) Kusto Query Language
11 2 (3.23%) Scala
12 1 (1.61%) Bash
12 1 (1.61%) Clojure
12 1 (1.61%) Haskell
12 1 (1.61%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 9 (14.52%) Degree
2 7 (11.29%) Computer Science Degree
3 4 (6.45%) Master's Degree
4 3 (4.84%) Security Cleared
5 2 (3.23%) AWS Certification
5 2 (3.23%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
5 2 (3.23%) SC Cleared
6 1 (1.61%) AWS Certified Developer
6 1 (1.61%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
6 1 (1.61%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
6 1 (1.61%) Azure Certification
6 1 (1.61%) CISM
6 1 (1.61%) CISSP
6 1 (1.61%) CompTIA CySA+
6 1 (1.61%) CompTIA Security+
6 1 (1.61%) ISO 27001 Lead Auditor
6 1 (1.61%) ITIL Certification
6 1 (1.61%) Microsoft Certification
6 1 (1.61%) SSCP
6 1 (1.61%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 6 (9.68%) Data Quality
2 2 (3.23%) Accessibility
3 1 (1.61%) Cyber Essentials
3 1 (1.61%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
3 1 (1.61%) ISO/IEC 27001
System Software
1 19 (30.65%) Docker
2 1 (1.61%) Platform Symphony
Systems Management
1 22 (35.48%) Kubernetes
2 10 (16.13%) Terraform
3 4 (6.45%) Ansible
3 4 (6.45%) Grafana
4 3 (4.84%) Prometheus
5 2 (3.23%) Kubeflow
6 1 (1.61%) CASB
6 1 (1.61%) ITRS Geneos
6 1 (1.61%) Kibana
6 1 (1.61%) Progress Chef
6 1 (1.61%) Puppet
Vendors
1 9 (14.52%) Oracle
2 8 (12.90%) Dynatrace
3 7 (11.29%) Splunk
4 5 (8.06%) AppDynamics
5 4 (6.45%) Google
6 2 (3.23%) CA Agile Central
6 2 (3.23%) Microsoft
6 2 (3.23%) ServiceNow
6 2 (3.23%) Sybase
7 1 (1.61%) Forcepoint
7 1 (1.61%) IBM
7 1 (1.61%) Okta
7 1 (1.61%) OpenAI
7 1 (1.61%) Salesforce
7 1 (1.61%) Solace
7 1 (1.61%) TIBCO