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 20 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 90 70 91
Rank change year-on-year -20 +21 -46
Permanent jobs citing Kubernetes 178 255 234
As % of all permanent jobs in the North West 1.56% 4.97% 2.40%
As % of the Systems Management category 33.21% 23.20% 35.19%
Number of salaries quoted 156 96 129
10th Percentile £46,750 £46,625 £42,500
25th Percentile £57,500 £58,813 £51,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £70,750 £74,750 £62,500
Median % change year-on-year -5.35% +19.60% -10.71%
75th Percentile £87,500 £93,778 £81,250
90th Percentile £97,500 £103,500 £92,500
England median annual salary £70,079 £80,000 £77,500
% change year-on-year -12.40% +3.23% -

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 536 1,099 665
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the North West 4.71% 21.40% 6.81%
Number of salaries quoted 435 260 469
10th Percentile £32,500 £29,800 £29,000
25th Percentile £40,500 £40,000 £39,750
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £62,500 £65,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% +18.18% -12.70%
75th Percentile £78,750 £77,500 £71,250
90th Percentile £90,000 £93,778 £82,500
England median annual salary £65,000 £65,000 £62,500
% change year-on-year - +4.00% -7.41%

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 20 July 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 20 July 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 -9 145 £71,500 -4.67% 62
Lancashire +5 12 £46,250 +9.77% 9
Merseyside -13 12 £95,000 - 1
Cheshire -48 8 £62,500 +4.17% 11
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 2 (1.12%) Apache
1 2 (1.12%) Apache Spark
1 2 (1.12%) Microsoft Exchange
1 2 (1.12%) OpenStack
Applications
1 1 (0.56%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 112 (62.92%) AWS
2 71 (39.89%) Azure
3 40 (22.47%) GitHub
4 36 (20.22%) Serverless
5 35 (19.66%) GCP
6 29 (16.29%) AWS CloudFormation
7 17 (9.55%) GitHub Actions
8 16 (8.99%) Azure AKS
9 15 (8.43%) Amazon EKS
9 15 (8.43%) AWS Lambda
10 14 (7.87%) Amazon ECS
10 14 (7.87%) Datadog
11 12 (6.74%) Google Kubernetes Engine
12 11 (6.18%) Amazon SQS
12 11 (6.18%) GitHub Copilot
13 10 (5.62%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 9 (5.06%) OpenShift
14 9 (5.06%) SaaS
15 8 (4.49%) Azure DevOps
16 7 (3.93%) Amazon EventBridge
Communications & Networking
1 7 (3.93%) Firewall
2 3 (1.69%) Network Security
3 2 (1.12%) AMQP
3 2 (1.12%) DNS
3 2 (1.12%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 24 (13.48%) MongoDB
2 21 (11.80%) PostgreSQL
3 15 (8.43%) NoSQL
4 8 (4.49%) Amazon RDS
5 7 (3.93%) DynamoDB
6 6 (3.37%) Azure SQL Database
7 5 (2.81%) Elasticsearch
7 5 (2.81%) Neo4j
7 5 (2.81%) Relational Database
8 3 (1.69%) Pinecone
9 2 (1.12%) Big Data
9 2 (1.12%) Cloudera CDH
9 2 (1.12%) Hadoop
9 2 (1.12%) SQL Server
10 1 (0.56%) Amazon Aurora
10 1 (0.56%) BigQuery
10 1 (0.56%) Data Warehouse
10 1 (0.56%) Redis
10 1 (0.56%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 24 (13.48%) Jenkins
2 23 (12.92%) Git
3 21 (11.80%) GitLab
4 7 (3.93%) Atlassian Bamboo
5 4 (2.25%) Bitbucket
5 4 (2.25%) Cucumber
5 4 (2.25%) Cypress.io
5 4 (2.25%) Robot Framework
5 4 (2.25%) Vite
6 3 (1.69%) Postman
6 3 (1.69%) Selenium
7 2 (1.12%) Claude Code
7 2 (1.12%) JIRA
7 2 (1.12%) Vagrant
8 1 (0.56%) Gemini Tracker
8 1 (0.56%) IntelliJ
8 1 (0.56%) JUnit
8 1 (0.56%) Mocha
General
1 14 (7.87%) Social Skills
2 10 (5.62%) Public Sector
3 8 (4.49%) Finance
4 7 (3.93%) Advertising
5 4 (2.25%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 3 (1.69%) Aerospace
7 2 (1.12%) Retail
8 1 (0.56%) Analytical Skills
8 1 (0.56%) Front Office
Job Titles
1 54 (30.34%) DevOps Engineer
2 47 (26.40%) Senior
3 31 (17.42%) Software Engineer
4 30 (16.85%) Cloud Engineer
4 30 (16.85%) Developer
5 23 (12.92%) Lead
6 16 (8.99%) Platform Engineer
7 14 (7.87%) Principal Engineer
8 13 (7.30%) Java Developer
9 10 (5.62%) Cloud Native Engineer
9 10 (5.62%) Senior Developer
9 10 (5.62%) Senior Java Developer
10 9 (5.06%) Architect
10 9 (5.06%) Azure Engineer
10 9 (5.06%) Senior DevOps
10 9 (5.06%) Senior DevOps Engineer
10 9 (5.06%) Senior Software Engineer
11 8 (4.49%) Cloud Architect
11 8 (4.49%) Lead Developer
11 8 (4.49%) Lead Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 36 (20.22%) Spring
2 34 (19.10%) Spring Boot
3 27 (15.17%) React
4 22 (12.36%) .NET
5 21 (11.80%) Node.js
5 21 (11.80%) RESTful
6 16 (8.99%) Kafka
7 15 (8.43%) AngularJS
8 14 (7.87%) Vue
9 13 (7.30%) FastAPI
10 9 (5.06%) RabbitMQ
11 8 (4.49%) Django
11 8 (4.49%) LangChain
11 8 (4.49%) OpenTelemetry
12 7 (3.93%) CSS
12 7 (3.93%) REST
13 6 (3.37%) .NET Core
13 6 (3.37%) .NET Framework
13 6 (3.37%) ASP.NET Core
13 6 (3.37%) ML.NET
Miscellaneous
1 66 (37.08%) Cloud Native
2 25 (14.04%) Distributed Systems
3 8 (4.49%) Hybrid Cloud
4 7 (3.93%) Greenfield Project
5 5 (2.81%) AI Agents
6 4 (2.25%) Enterprise Cloud
6 4 (2.25%) Security Posture
7 3 (1.69%) Cloud Security Posture
8 2 (1.12%) Legacy Systems
8 2 (1.12%) Mobile App
8 2 (1.12%) Product Ownership
8 2 (1.12%) Self-Motivation
9 1 (0.56%) Culture of Ownership
9 1 (0.56%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 25 (14.04%) Linux
2 7 (3.93%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 5 (2.81%) CentOS
4 4 (2.25%) Debian
4 4 (2.25%) Ubuntu
5 3 (1.69%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 131 (73.60%) CI/CD
2 120 (67.42%) DevOps
3 96 (53.93%) Infrastructure as Code
4 89 (50.00%) Containerisation
5 60 (33.71%) Agile
6 53 (29.78%) Platform Engineering
7 46 (25.84%) Software Engineering
8 44 (24.72%) AI
9 42 (23.60%) Observability
10 39 (21.91%) Mentoring
10 39 (21.91%) Microservices
11 36 (20.22%) Site Reliability Engineering
12 34 (19.10%) Continuous Improvement
13 32 (17.98%) Problem-Solving
14 28 (15.73%) TDD
15 24 (13.48%) Clean Code
16 23 (12.92%) Scrum
17 20 (11.24%) Cloud Security
17 20 (11.24%) Collaborative Culture
17 20 (11.24%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 67 (37.64%) Python
2 47 (26.40%) Java
3 29 (16.29%) TypeScript
4 25 (14.04%) Bash
5 24 (13.48%) SQL
6 21 (11.80%) C#
7 20 (11.24%) JavaScript
8 16 (8.99%) PowerShell
9 13 (7.30%) Go
10 7 (3.93%) Bicep
11 3 (1.69%) Kotlin
11 3 (1.69%) Scala
12 1 (0.56%) C
12 1 (0.56%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 52 (29.21%) Security Cleared
2 28 (15.73%) DV Cleared
2 28 (15.73%) SC Cleared
3 6 (3.37%) Azure Certification
4 5 (2.81%) Degree
5 4 (2.25%) Computer Science Degree
6 3 (1.69%) AWS Certification
7 2 (1.12%) Microsoft Certified Professional
8 1 (0.56%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (2.25%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 3 (1.69%) PCI DSS
2 3 (1.69%) SOC 2
3 1 (0.56%) Accessibility
3 1 (0.56%) QA
System Software
1 105 (58.99%) Docker
2 4 (2.25%) Virtual Machines
3 3 (1.69%) VMware Infrastructure
4 2 (1.12%) Active Directory
5 1 (0.56%) VMware NSX
5 1 (0.56%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 105 (58.99%) Terraform
2 43 (24.16%) Ansible
3 18 (10.11%) Grafana
4 16 (8.99%) Prometheus
5 8 (4.49%) Argo
5 8 (4.49%) Istio
6 7 (3.93%) linkerd
7 5 (2.81%) Progress Chef
8 4 (2.25%) Puppet
9 2 (1.12%) Microsoft Intune
9 2 (1.12%) Packer
Vendors
1 14 (7.87%) Google
2 12 (6.74%) Microsoft
3 7 (3.93%) HubSpot
4 6 (3.37%) OpenAI
5 4 (2.25%) VMware
6 3 (1.69%) Dynatrace
6 3 (1.69%) Splunk
7 2 (1.12%) Pega
7 2 (1.12%) Red Hat
7 2 (1.12%) SaltStack
7 2 (1.12%) WSO2
8 1 (0.56%) Databricks
8 1 (0.56%) Percona