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

6 months to
16 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 94 70 93
Rank change year-on-year -24 +23 -50
Permanent jobs citing Kubernetes 174 259 231
As % of all permanent jobs in the North West 1.54% 5.05% 2.25%
As % of the Systems Management category 32.58% 23.38% 34.12%
Number of salaries quoted 154 101 132
10th Percentile £46,975 £47,500 £42,500
25th Percentile £57,813 £60,000 £51,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £71,500 £75,000 £62,500
Median % change year-on-year -4.67% +20.00% -10.71%
75th Percentile £88,438 £93,778 £80,313
90th Percentile £97,500 £112,500 £92,500
England median annual salary £70,000 £80,000 £77,500
% change year-on-year -12.50% +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 534 1,108 677
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the North West 4.74% 21.59% 6.60%
Number of salaries quoted 434 269 486
10th Percentile £32,500 £32,000 £29,000
25th Percentile £40,500 £40,620 £38,992
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £62,500 £65,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% +18.18% -12.00%
75th Percentile £78,750 £77,500 £70,000
90th Percentile £90,000 £93,778 £82,500
England median annual salary £65,000 £67,037 £62,500
% change year-on-year -3.04% +7.26% -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 16 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 16 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 -18 142 £72,000 -4.00% 65
Lancashire +3 12 £46,250 +9.77% 13
Merseyside -13 12 £95,000 - 1
Cheshire -47 7 £62,500 +4.17% 6
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 (1.15%) Apache
1 2 (1.15%) Apache Spark
1 2 (1.15%) Microsoft Exchange
1 2 (1.15%) OpenStack
Applications
1 1 (0.57%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 111 (63.79%) AWS
2 73 (41.95%) Azure
3 39 (22.41%) GitHub
4 36 (20.69%) GCP
5 35 (20.11%) Serverless
6 28 (16.09%) AWS CloudFormation
7 17 (9.77%) GitHub Actions
8 16 (9.20%) Azure AKS
9 15 (8.62%) Amazon EKS
9 15 (8.62%) AWS Lambda
10 14 (8.05%) Amazon ECS
10 14 (8.05%) Datadog
11 11 (6.32%) Amazon SQS
11 11 (6.32%) Google Kubernetes Engine
12 10 (5.75%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 10 (5.75%) GitHub Copilot
13 9 (5.17%) OpenShift
13 9 (5.17%) SaaS
14 8 (4.60%) Azure DevOps
15 7 (4.02%) Amazon EventBridge
Communications & Networking
1 7 (4.02%) Firewall
2 3 (1.72%) Network Security
3 2 (1.15%) AMQP
3 2 (1.15%) DNS
3 2 (1.15%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 24 (13.79%) MongoDB
2 22 (12.64%) PostgreSQL
3 16 (9.20%) NoSQL
4 8 (4.60%) Amazon RDS
5 7 (4.02%) DynamoDB
6 6 (3.45%) Azure SQL Database
7 5 (2.87%) Elasticsearch
7 5 (2.87%) Neo4j
7 5 (2.87%) Relational Database
8 3 (1.72%) Pinecone
9 2 (1.15%) Big Data
9 2 (1.15%) Cloudera CDH
9 2 (1.15%) Hadoop
9 2 (1.15%) SQL Server
10 1 (0.57%) BigQuery
10 1 (0.57%) Data Warehouse
10 1 (0.57%) Redis
10 1 (0.57%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 24 (13.79%) Jenkins
2 23 (13.22%) Git
3 21 (12.07%) GitLab
4 7 (4.02%) Atlassian Bamboo
5 4 (2.30%) Bitbucket
5 4 (2.30%) Cucumber
5 4 (2.30%) Cypress.io
5 4 (2.30%) Robot Framework
5 4 (2.30%) Vite
6 3 (1.72%) Postman
6 3 (1.72%) Selenium
7 2 (1.15%) Claude Code
7 2 (1.15%) JIRA
7 2 (1.15%) Vagrant
8 1 (0.57%) Gemini Tracker
8 1 (0.57%) IntelliJ
8 1 (0.57%) JUnit
8 1 (0.57%) Mocha
General
1 15 (8.62%) Social Skills
2 10 (5.75%) Public Sector
3 7 (4.02%) Advertising
3 7 (4.02%) Finance
4 3 (1.72%) Aerospace
4 3 (1.72%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 2 (1.15%) Retail
6 1 (0.57%) Analytical Skills
Job Titles
1 51 (29.31%) DevOps Engineer
2 48 (27.59%) Senior
3 31 (17.82%) Developer
3 31 (17.82%) Software Engineer
4 29 (16.67%) Cloud Engineer
5 23 (13.22%) Lead
6 16 (9.20%) Platform Engineer
7 14 (8.05%) Java Developer
8 13 (7.47%) Principal Engineer
9 11 (6.32%) Senior Developer
9 11 (6.32%) Senior Java Developer
10 9 (5.17%) Architect
10 9 (5.17%) Azure Engineer
10 9 (5.17%) Cloud Native Engineer
10 9 (5.17%) Senior DevOps
10 9 (5.17%) Senior DevOps Engineer
10 9 (5.17%) Senior Software Engineer
11 8 (4.60%) Cloud Architect
11 8 (4.60%) Lead Software Engineer
11 8 (4.60%) Senior Platform Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 36 (20.69%) Spring
2 34 (19.54%) Spring Boot
3 27 (15.52%) React
4 22 (12.64%) RESTful
5 21 (12.07%) .NET
5 21 (12.07%) Node.js
6 16 (9.20%) Kafka
7 15 (8.62%) Vue
8 14 (8.05%) AngularJS
9 13 (7.47%) FastAPI
10 9 (5.17%) Django
10 9 (5.17%) RabbitMQ
11 8 (4.60%) LangChain
11 8 (4.60%) OpenTelemetry
12 7 (4.02%) CSS
12 7 (4.02%) REST
13 6 (3.45%) .NET Framework
13 6 (3.45%) ASP.NET
13 6 (3.45%) Hibernate
13 6 (3.45%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 63 (36.21%) Cloud Native
2 25 (14.37%) Distributed Systems
3 8 (4.60%) Hybrid Cloud
4 7 (4.02%) Greenfield Project
5 5 (2.87%) AI Agents
6 4 (2.30%) Enterprise Cloud
6 4 (2.30%) Security Posture
7 3 (1.72%) Cloud Security Posture
8 2 (1.15%) Legacy Systems
8 2 (1.15%) Mobile App
8 2 (1.15%) Product Ownership
8 2 (1.15%) Self-Motivation
9 1 (0.57%) Culture of Ownership
9 1 (0.57%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 24 (13.79%) Linux
2 7 (4.02%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 5 (2.87%) CentOS
4 4 (2.30%) Debian
4 4 (2.30%) Ubuntu
5 3 (1.72%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 128 (73.56%) CI/CD
2 116 (66.67%) DevOps
3 94 (54.02%) Infrastructure as Code
4 88 (50.57%) Containerisation
5 60 (34.48%) Agile
6 51 (29.31%) Platform Engineering
7 45 (25.86%) AI
8 44 (25.29%) Software Engineering
9 40 (22.99%) Observability
10 38 (21.84%) Microservices
11 37 (21.26%) Mentoring
12 35 (20.11%) Continuous Improvement
13 34 (19.54%) Problem-Solving
14 32 (18.39%) Site Reliability Engineering
15 29 (16.67%) TDD
16 25 (14.37%) Clean Code
17 23 (13.22%) Scrum
18 21 (12.07%) Collaborative Culture
19 19 (10.92%) Cloud Security
19 19 (10.92%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 65 (37.36%) Python
2 47 (27.01%) Java
3 29 (16.67%) TypeScript
4 25 (14.37%) SQL
5 23 (13.22%) Bash
6 20 (11.49%) C#
6 20 (11.49%) JavaScript
7 16 (9.20%) PowerShell
8 12 (6.90%) Go
9 7 (4.02%) Bicep
10 3 (1.72%) Kotlin
10 3 (1.72%) Scala
11 1 (0.57%) C
Qualifications
1 50 (28.74%) Security Cleared
2 27 (15.52%) SC Cleared
3 26 (14.94%) DV Cleared
4 6 (3.45%) Azure Certification
4 6 (3.45%) Degree
5 5 (2.87%) Computer Science Degree
6 3 (1.72%) AWS Certification
7 2 (1.15%) Microsoft Certified Professional
8 1 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (2.30%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 3 (1.72%) PCI DSS
2 3 (1.72%) SOC 2
3 1 (0.57%) Accessibility
3 1 (0.57%) QA
System Software
1 104 (59.77%) Docker
2 4 (2.30%) Virtual Machines
3 3 (1.72%) VMware Infrastructure
4 2 (1.15%) Active Directory
5 1 (0.57%) VMware NSX
5 1 (0.57%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 102 (58.62%) Terraform
2 40 (22.99%) Ansible
3 16 (9.20%) Grafana
4 14 (8.05%) Prometheus
5 8 (4.60%) Argo
5 8 (4.60%) Istio
6 7 (4.02%) linkerd
7 4 (2.30%) Progress Chef
7 4 (2.30%) Puppet
8 2 (1.15%) Microsoft Intune
8 2 (1.15%) Packer
Vendors
1 13 (7.47%) Google
2 12 (6.90%) Microsoft
3 7 (4.02%) HubSpot
4 6 (3.45%) OpenAI
5 4 (2.30%) VMware
6 3 (1.72%) Dynatrace
6 3 (1.72%) Splunk
7 2 (1.15%) Pega
7 2 (1.15%) Red Hat
7 2 (1.15%) SaltStack
7 2 (1.15%) WSO2
8 1 (0.57%) Databricks