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 15 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
15 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 89 76 72
Rank change year-on-year -13 -4 -49
Permanent jobs citing Kubernetes 199 227 212
As % of all permanent jobs in the North West 1.58% 4.45% 2.75%
As % of the Systems Management category 41.54% 22.45% 43.62%
Number of salaries quoted 159 72 77
10th Percentile £46,750 £52,500 £42,500
25th Percentile £56,875 £58,813 £52,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £72,500 £67,500 £62,500
Median % change year-on-year +7.41% +8.00% -16.67%
75th Percentile £88,148 £82,563 £75,000
90th Percentile £97,500 £89,900 £85,000
England median annual salary £70,000 £78,810 £77,500
% change year-on-year -11.18% +1.69% +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 479 1,011 486
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the North West 3.80% 19.83% 6.30%
Number of salaries quoted 358 195 230
10th Percentile £31,175 £26,100 £31,250
25th Percentile £38,750 £33,125 £37,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £57,500 £52,500 £50,000
Median % change year-on-year +9.52% +5.00% -23.49%
75th Percentile £76,882 £69,375 £66,875
90th Percentile £90,000 £83,650 £76,025
England median annual salary £60,000 £60,625 £65,000
% change year-on-year -1.03% -6.73% -

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 15 September 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 15 September 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 -19 163 £72,500 +7.41% 218
Lancashire +3 14 £51,065 -15.60% 30
Merseyside -10 12 £95,000 +46.15% 5
Cheshire -49 9 £62,500 -13.79% 14
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 4 (2.01%) Apache Spark
1 4 (2.01%) OpenStack
2 3 (1.51%) Apache
3 1 (0.50%) Apache Airflow
Applications
1 1 (0.50%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 130 (65.33%) AWS
2 72 (36.18%) Azure
3 45 (22.61%) GitHub
4 42 (21.11%) GCP
5 37 (18.59%) Serverless
6 31 (15.58%) AWS CloudFormation
7 21 (10.55%) OpenShift
8 20 (10.05%) GitHub Actions
9 19 (9.55%) AWS Lambda
10 14 (7.04%) Amazon ECS
10 14 (7.04%) Datadog
11 12 (6.03%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 12 (6.03%) Google Kubernetes Engine
11 12 (6.03%) SaaS
12 11 (5.53%) GitHub Copilot
13 10 (5.03%) Amazon SQS
13 10 (5.03%) Azure AKS
13 10 (5.03%) Azure DevOps
14 9 (4.52%) Amazon EKS
14 9 (4.52%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 3 (1.51%) AMQP
1 3 (1.51%) Firewall
1 3 (1.51%) Network Security
1 3 (1.51%) Software-Defined Networking
2 1 (0.50%) HTTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 24 (12.06%) MongoDB
2 18 (9.05%) PostgreSQL
3 10 (5.03%) NoSQL
4 9 (4.52%) Amazon RDS
5 8 (4.02%) DynamoDB
6 6 (3.02%) Azure SQL Database
7 5 (2.51%) Elasticsearch
7 5 (2.51%) Neo4j
8 4 (2.01%) Big Data
9 3 (1.51%) Chroma
9 3 (1.51%) Cloudera CDH
9 3 (1.51%) Hadoop
9 3 (1.51%) Pinecone
9 3 (1.51%) Relational Database
10 2 (1.01%) Amazon Aurora
10 2 (1.01%) Redis
10 2 (1.01%) SQL Server
11 1 (0.50%) BigQuery
11 1 (0.50%) Data Warehouse
11 1 (0.50%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 31 (15.58%) Git
2 28 (14.07%) Jenkins
3 27 (13.57%) GitLab
4 8 (4.02%) Atlassian Bamboo
5 5 (2.51%) Cypress.io
6 4 (2.01%) Bitbucket
6 4 (2.01%) Cucumber
6 4 (2.01%) Robot Framework
6 4 (2.01%) Vite
7 3 (1.51%) JIRA
7 3 (1.51%) Postman
7 3 (1.51%) Selenium
8 2 (1.01%) Mocha
8 2 (1.01%) Vagrant
9 1 (0.50%) Artifactory
9 1 (0.50%) Claude Code
9 1 (0.50%) Gemini Tracker
9 1 (0.50%) Maven
9 1 (0.50%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 24 (12.06%) Social Skills
2 15 (7.54%) Public Sector
3 10 (5.03%) Finance
4 7 (3.52%) Advertising
5 6 (3.02%) Aerospace
6 5 (2.51%) Analytical Skills
6 5 (2.51%) Publishing
7 4 (2.01%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 2 (1.01%) Manufacturing
8 2 (1.01%) Presentation Skills
8 2 (1.01%) Retail
9 1 (0.50%) Front Office
9 1 (0.50%) iGaming
Job Titles
1 62 (31.16%) DevOps Engineer
2 51 (25.63%) Senior
3 35 (17.59%) Developer
4 31 (15.58%) Cloud Engineer
5 27 (13.57%) Software Engineer
6 26 (13.07%) Lead
7 17 (8.54%) Platform Engineer
7 17 (8.54%) Principal Engineer
8 13 (6.53%) Architect
9 11 (5.53%) Cloud Native Engineer
9 11 (5.53%) Java Developer
9 11 (5.53%) Senior Developer
9 11 (5.53%) Senior DevOps
9 11 (5.53%) Senior DevOps Engineer
9 11 (5.53%) Senior Software Engineer
10 10 (5.03%) Lead Developer
10 10 (5.03%) Principal DevOps Engineer
11 9 (4.52%) Senior Java Developer
12 8 (4.02%) Cloud Architect
12 8 (4.02%) Lead DevOps
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 121 (60.80%) Terraform
2 46 (23.12%) Spring
3 44 (22.11%) Spring Boot
4 36 (18.09%) React
5 25 (12.56%) Node.js
6 23 (11.56%) Kafka
7 17 (8.54%) AngularJS
8 16 (8.04%) .NET
9 15 (7.54%) RESTful
10 14 (7.04%) Vue
11 12 (6.03%) REST
12 11 (5.53%) FastAPI
13 10 (5.03%) RabbitMQ
14 9 (4.52%) OpenTelemetry
15 8 (4.02%) LangChain
16 7 (3.52%) CSS
16 7 (3.52%) OpenAPI
16 7 (3.52%) Swagger
17 6 (3.02%) ASP.NET
17 6 (3.02%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 71 (35.68%) Cloud Native
2 22 (11.06%) Distributed Systems
3 10 (5.03%) Greenfield Project
4 7 (3.52%) Hybrid Cloud
5 5 (2.51%) AI Agents
5 5 (2.51%) Media Streaming
5 5 (2.51%) Podcast
6 4 (2.01%) Security Posture
7 3 (1.51%) Cloud Security Posture
7 3 (1.51%) Life Science
7 3 (1.51%) Product Ownership
7 3 (1.51%) Social Media
8 2 (1.01%) Enterprise Cloud
8 2 (1.01%) Legacy Systems
8 2 (1.01%) Onboarding
8 2 (1.01%) Renewable Energy
9 1 (0.50%) Culture of Ownership
9 1 (0.50%) Data Centre
9 1 (0.50%) Management Information System
9 1 (0.50%) Online Gambling
Operating Systems
1 31 (15.58%) Linux
2 9 (4.52%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 7 (3.52%) CentOS
4 4 (2.01%) Windows
5 3 (1.51%) Debian
5 3 (1.51%) Ubuntu
6 1 (0.50%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 147 (73.87%) CI/CD
2 128 (64.32%) DevOps
3 106 (53.27%) Infrastructure as Code
4 95 (47.74%) Containerisation
5 72 (36.18%) Agile
6 55 (27.64%) AI
6 55 (27.64%) Platform Engineering
7 51 (25.63%) Observability
7 51 (25.63%) Software Engineering
8 47 (23.62%) Mentoring
9 46 (23.12%) Microservices
10 42 (21.11%) Site Reliability Engineering
11 41 (20.60%) Continuous Improvement
12 37 (18.59%) Problem-Solving
13 26 (13.07%) Event-Driven
14 23 (11.56%) TDD
15 22 (11.06%) Cloud Security
15 22 (11.06%) Scrum
16 19 (9.55%) Stakeholder Management
16 19 (9.55%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 84 (42.21%) Python
2 62 (31.16%) Java
3 36 (18.09%) TypeScript
4 35 (17.59%) Bash
5 28 (14.07%) JavaScript
6 22 (11.06%) SQL
7 20 (10.05%) PowerShell
8 17 (8.54%) Go
9 16 (8.04%) C#
10 9 (4.52%) Bicep
11 5 (2.51%) Rust
12 4 (2.01%) Kotlin
12 4 (2.01%) Scala
13 3 (1.51%) C++
14 2 (1.01%) Shell Script
15 1 (0.50%) C
15 1 (0.50%) Objective-C
15 1 (0.50%) PL/SQL
15 1 (0.50%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 66 (33.17%) Security Cleared
2 40 (20.10%) DV Cleared
3 34 (17.09%) SC Cleared
4 7 (3.52%) AWS Certification
4 7 (3.52%) Azure Certification
5 6 (3.02%) Degree
6 4 (2.01%) Computer Science Degree
7 2 (1.01%) Microsoft Certified Professional
8 1 (0.50%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 1 (0.50%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (2.01%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 3 (1.51%) PCI DSS
2 3 (1.51%) QA
2 3 (1.51%) SOC 2
3 1 (0.50%) Accessibility
System Software
1 126 (63.32%) Docker
2 4 (2.01%) Virtual Machines
2 4 (2.01%) VMware Infrastructure
3 3 (1.51%) Ceph
4 2 (1.01%) Active Directory
4 2 (1.01%) VMware NSX
5 1 (0.50%) VMware ESXi
5 1 (0.50%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 58 (29.15%) Ansible
2 20 (10.05%) Prometheus
3 19 (9.55%) Grafana
4 13 (6.53%) Argo
5 12 (6.03%) Istio
6 10 (5.03%) Puppet
7 9 (4.52%) Progress Chef
8 8 (4.02%) linkerd
9 3 (1.51%) Check_MK
9 3 (1.51%) Podman
9 3 (1.51%) Single Sign-On
10 2 (1.01%) Packer
11 1 (0.50%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 18 (9.05%) Google
2 14 (7.04%) Microsoft
3 7 (3.52%) HubSpot
4 6 (3.02%) OpenAI
4 6 (3.02%) Red Hat
5 5 (2.51%) VMware
6 4 (2.01%) Mistral
7 3 (1.51%) Dell
7 3 (1.51%) Dynatrace
7 3 (1.51%) SaltStack
7 3 (1.51%) Splunk
8 2 (1.01%) Databricks
9 1 (0.50%) New Relic
9 1 (0.50%) Oracle
9 1 (0.50%) Pega
9 1 (0.50%) Percona
9 1 (0.50%) WSO2
9 1 (0.50%) YouTube