Kubernetes Job Trends in the North West

Kubernetes (k8s)
England > North West

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs advertised in the North West requiring Kubernetes skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 9 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
9 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 91 83 68
Rank change year-on-year -8 -15 -45
Permanent jobs citing Kubernetes 214 219 219
As % of all permanent jobs in the North West 1.66% 4.18% 2.99%
As % of the Systems Management category 40.15% 21.32% 43.03%
Number of salaries quoted 160 68 84
10th Percentile £44,875 £51,100 £42,500
25th Percentile £55,625 £57,500 £52,188
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £72,500 £65,000 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year +11.54% +8.33% -20.00%
75th Percentile £88,299 £78,125 £75,000
90th Percentile £96,250 £87,950 £86,750
England median annual salary £70,000 £77,500 £77,500
% change year-on-year -9.68% - +3.33%

All Systems Management Skills
North West

Kubernetes falls under the Systems Management category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent job vacancies requiring systems management skills in the North West.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for systems management skills 533 1,027 509
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the North West 4.14% 19.59% 6.95%
Number of salaries quoted 393 205 238
10th Percentile £33,000 £26,250 £31,600
25th Percentile £42,215 £33,125 £39,727
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £48,720 £50,000
Median % change year-on-year +12.89% -2.56% -23.08%
75th Percentile £75,000 £67,500 £67,500
90th Percentile £88,750 £80,750 £76,450
England median annual salary £60,000 £60,000 £65,000
% change year-on-year - -7.69% -

Kubernetes
Job Vacancy Trend in the North West

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing Kubernetes relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised in the North West.

Kubernetes job vacancy trend in the North West

Kubernetes
Salary Trend in the North West

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing Kubernetes.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing Kubernetes

Kubernetes
Salary Histogram in the North West

Salary distribution for jobs citing Kubernetes in the North West over the 6 months to 9 October 2026.

Salary histogram for Kubernetes in the North West

Kubernetes
Job Locations in the North West

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Kubernetes within the North West region over the 6 months to 9 October 2026. 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
Permanent
IT Job Ads
Median Salary
Past 6 Months
Median Salary
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
Manchester -13 177 £75,000 +13.21% 166
Lancashire +3 14 £51,065 -15.60% 9
Cheshire -46 11 £62,500 -7.41% 11
Merseyside -18 10 £77,500 +19.23% 4
Kubernetes
England

Kubernetes
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the North West 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:

Application Platforms
1 6 (2.80%) Apache Spark
2 5 (2.34%) Apache
3 3 (1.40%) Apache Airflow
3 3 (1.40%) OpenStack
4 2 (0.93%) Confluence
5 1 (0.47%) IIS
Cloud Services
1 137 (64.02%) AWS
2 70 (32.71%) Azure
3 46 (21.50%) GitHub
4 41 (19.16%) GCP
5 35 (16.36%) Serverless
6 27 (12.62%) AWS CloudFormation
7 22 (10.28%) OpenShift
8 18 (8.41%) AWS Lambda
9 17 (7.94%) GitHub Actions
10 12 (5.61%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 12 (5.61%) SaaS
11 11 (5.14%) Amazon ECS
11 11 (5.14%) GitHub Copilot
11 11 (5.14%) Google Kubernetes Engine
12 10 (4.67%) Azure AKS
13 8 (3.74%) Azure DevOps
13 8 (3.74%) Datadog
14 7 (3.27%) Amazon EKS
14 7 (3.27%) Amazon SQS
14 7 (3.27%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 4 (1.87%) Firewall
2 3 (1.40%) AMQP
2 3 (1.40%) DNS
2 3 (1.40%) Network Security
2 3 (1.40%) Software-Defined Networking
3 1 (0.47%) DHCP
3 1 (0.47%) HTTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 28 (13.08%) MongoDB
2 18 (8.41%) PostgreSQL
3 9 (4.21%) Amazon RDS
4 8 (3.74%) NoSQL
5 6 (2.80%) Azure SQL Database
6 5 (2.34%) Chroma
6 5 (2.34%) DynamoDB
6 5 (2.34%) Elasticsearch
6 5 (2.34%) Neo4j
6 5 (2.34%) Pinecone
7 4 (1.87%) Big Data
8 3 (1.40%) Cloudera CDH
8 3 (1.40%) Hadoop
9 2 (0.93%) Amazon Athena
9 2 (0.93%) Amazon Aurora
9 2 (0.93%) Amazon Redshift
9 2 (0.93%) Power BI
9 2 (0.93%) Power Query
9 2 (0.93%) Redis
9 2 (0.93%) Relational Database
Development Applications
1 35 (16.36%) Git
2 32 (14.95%) GitLab
3 28 (13.08%) Jenkins
4 9 (4.21%) Atlassian Bamboo
5 6 (2.80%) JIRA
6 5 (2.34%) Cypress.io
7 4 (1.87%) Artifactory
7 4 (1.87%) Bitbucket
7 4 (1.87%) Cucumber
7 4 (1.87%) Robot Framework
7 4 (1.87%) Vagrant
7 4 (1.87%) Vite
8 3 (1.40%) Postman
8 3 (1.40%) Selenium
9 2 (0.93%) Mocha
10 1 (0.47%) Claude Code
10 1 (0.47%) Gemini Tracker
10 1 (0.47%) Maven
10 1 (0.47%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 34 (15.89%) Social Skills
2 17 (7.94%) Public Sector
3 12 (5.61%) Finance
3 12 (5.61%) Publishing
4 7 (3.27%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 6 (2.80%) Advertising
5 6 (2.80%) Aerospace
6 4 (1.87%) Analytical Skills
7 2 (0.93%) Manufacturing
7 2 (0.93%) Presentation Skills
8 1 (0.47%) Front Office
8 1 (0.47%) iGaming
8 1 (0.47%) Retail
Job Titles
1 70 (32.71%) DevOps Engineer
2 56 (26.17%) Senior
3 35 (16.36%) Developer
4 32 (14.95%) Software Engineer
5 30 (14.02%) Lead
6 27 (12.62%) Cloud Engineer
7 18 (8.41%) Principal Engineer
8 17 (7.94%) Platform Engineer
9 15 (7.01%) Senior Software Engineer
10 14 (6.54%) Architect
11 12 (5.61%) Cloud Native Engineer
11 12 (5.61%) Lead DevOps
11 12 (5.61%) Lead DevOps Engineer
11 12 (5.61%) Principal DevOps Engineer
11 12 (5.61%) Senior Developer
11 12 (5.61%) Senior DevOps
11 12 (5.61%) Senior DevOps Engineer
12 11 (5.14%) AWS Engineer
12 11 (5.14%) Java Developer
13 9 (4.21%) Cloud Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 124 (57.94%) Terraform
2 59 (27.57%) Spring
3 56 (26.17%) Spring Boot
4 47 (21.96%) React
5 32 (14.95%) Kafka
6 20 (9.35%) Node.js
7 16 (7.48%) .NET
7 16 (7.48%) AngularJS
8 13 (6.07%) Vue
9 12 (5.61%) FastAPI
9 12 (5.61%) REST
9 12 (5.61%) RESTful
10 10 (4.67%) LangChain
10 10 (4.67%) RabbitMQ
11 7 (3.27%) CrewAI
11 7 (3.27%) CSS
11 7 (3.27%) LangGraph
11 7 (3.27%) OpenAPI
11 7 (3.27%) Swagger
12 6 (2.80%) ML.NET
Miscellaneous
1 71 (33.18%) Cloud Native
2 15 (7.01%) Distributed Systems
3 12 (5.61%) Media Streaming
3 12 (5.61%) Podcast
4 10 (4.67%) Greenfield Project
5 6 (2.80%) AI Agents
6 5 (2.34%) Hybrid Cloud
7 4 (1.87%) Security Posture
8 3 (1.40%) Cloud Security Posture
8 3 (1.40%) Life Science
8 3 (1.40%) Product Ownership
8 3 (1.40%) Social Media
9 2 (0.93%) Legacy Systems
9 2 (0.93%) Onboarding
9 2 (0.93%) Renewable Energy
10 1 (0.47%) Culture of Ownership
10 1 (0.47%) Cyber Defence
10 1 (0.47%) Data Centre
10 1 (0.47%) Enterprise Cloud
10 1 (0.47%) Hackathon
Operating Systems
1 35 (16.36%) Linux
2 9 (4.21%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 8 (3.74%) CentOS
4 7 (3.27%) Windows
5 4 (1.87%) Ubuntu
6 3 (1.40%) Debian
7 2 (0.93%) Unix
8 1 (0.47%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 154 (71.96%) CI/CD
2 141 (65.89%) DevOps
3 107 (50.00%) Infrastructure as Code
4 99 (46.26%) Containerisation
5 90 (42.06%) Agile
6 61 (28.50%) AI
7 58 (27.10%) Software Engineering
8 57 (26.64%) Mentoring
9 54 (25.23%) Observability
10 53 (24.77%) Microservices
10 53 (24.77%) Platform Engineering
11 48 (22.43%) Continuous Improvement
12 43 (20.09%) Site Reliability Engineering
13 40 (18.69%) Problem-Solving
14 32 (14.95%) Event-Driven
15 26 (12.15%) Cloud Security
15 26 (12.15%) Scrum
16 23 (10.75%) Code Quality
16 23 (10.75%) Technical Leadership
17 22 (10.28%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 91 (42.52%) Python
2 78 (36.45%) Java
3 42 (19.63%) TypeScript
4 40 (18.69%) Bash
5 28 (13.08%) JavaScript
6 22 (10.28%) PowerShell
7 21 (9.81%) SQL
8 18 (8.41%) Go
9 16 (7.48%) C#
10 10 (4.67%) Bicep
11 5 (2.34%) Rust
12 4 (1.87%) Kotlin
12 4 (1.87%) Scala
13 3 (1.40%) C++
14 2 (0.93%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 2 (0.93%) Shell Script
15 1 (0.47%) C
15 1 (0.47%) Objective-C
15 1 (0.47%) PL/SQL
15 1 (0.47%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 75 (35.05%) Security Cleared
2 48 (22.43%) DV Cleared
3 37 (17.29%) SC Cleared
4 10 (4.67%) AWS Certification
5 6 (2.80%) Azure Certification
5 6 (2.80%) Degree
6 3 (1.40%) Computer Science Degree
7 2 (0.93%) Microsoft Certification
7 2 (0.93%) Microsoft Certified Professional
8 1 (0.47%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
8 1 (0.47%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (2.34%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 4 (1.87%) PCI DSS
3 3 (1.40%) QA
3 3 (1.40%) SOC 2
4 2 (0.93%) Data Quality
5 1 (0.47%) Accessibility
5 1 (0.47%) Cyber Essentials
System Software
1 131 (61.21%) Docker
2 5 (2.34%) VMware Infrastructure
3 4 (1.87%) Virtual Machines
4 3 (1.40%) Ceph
4 3 (1.40%) VMware ESXi
4 3 (1.40%) VMware NSX
5 2 (0.93%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 62 (28.97%) Ansible
2 18 (8.41%) Prometheus
3 17 (7.94%) Grafana
4 13 (6.07%) Argo
5 12 (5.61%) Puppet
6 11 (5.14%) Istio
6 11 (5.14%) Progress Chef
7 8 (3.74%) linkerd
8 4 (1.87%) Packer
9 3 (1.40%) Check_MK
9 3 (1.40%) Podman
9 3 (1.40%) Single Sign-On
9 3 (1.40%) vCenter Server
10 1 (0.47%) Opsview
Vendors
1 18 (8.41%) Google
1 18 (8.41%) Microsoft
2 8 (3.74%) OpenAI
3 6 (2.80%) Mistral
3 6 (2.80%) Red Hat
3 6 (2.80%) VMware
4 4 (1.87%) Databricks
4 4 (1.87%) HubSpot
4 4 (1.87%) YouTube
5 3 (1.40%) Dell
5 3 (1.40%) Dynatrace
5 3 (1.40%) SaltStack
5 3 (1.40%) Splunk
6 1 (0.47%) CrowdStrike
6 1 (0.47%) New Relic
6 1 (0.47%) Oracle
6 1 (0.47%) Percona