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 8 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
8 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 88 72 80
Rank change year-on-year -16 +8 -38
Permanent jobs citing Kubernetes 193 247 225
As % of all permanent jobs in the North West 1.64% 4.80% 2.70%
As % of the Systems Management category 33.62% 22.79% 37.75%
Number of salaries quoted 162 89 100
10th Percentile £46,825 £47,500 £42,500
25th Percentile £57,500 £57,500 £50,625
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £71,750 £72,500 £65,000
Median % change year-on-year -1.03% +11.54% -10.34%
75th Percentile £88,438 £87,500 £76,563
90th Percentile £97,375 £101,100 £92,500
England median annual salary £70,932 £80,000 £77,500
% change year-on-year -11.34% +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 574 1,084 596
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the North West 4.88% 21.07% 7.16%
Number of salaries quoted 455 252 385
10th Percentile £32,600 £28,000 £30,600
25th Percentile £40,500 £40,000 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £62,500 £60,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +4.17% +9.09% -15.38%
75th Percentile £77,750 £77,500 £71,250
90th Percentile £90,000 £87,500 £81,250
England median annual salary £65,000 £65,000 £65,000
% change year-on-year - - -3.70%

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 8 August 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 8 August 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 -10 158 £72,500 -1.69% 113
Lancashire +10 12 £46,250 -23.55% 14
Merseyside -15 12 £95,000 - 1
Cheshire -51 10 £62,500 -5.66% 18
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 5 (2.59%) OpenStack
2 2 (1.04%) Apache
2 2 (1.04%) Apache Spark
3 1 (0.52%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 1 (0.52%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 121 (62.69%) AWS
2 73 (37.82%) Azure
3 42 (21.76%) GCP
4 41 (21.24%) GitHub
5 36 (18.65%) Serverless
6 32 (16.58%) AWS CloudFormation
7 18 (9.33%) Amazon ECS
7 18 (9.33%) GitHub Actions
8 16 (8.29%) AWS Lambda
8 16 (8.29%) OpenShift
9 14 (7.25%) Amazon EKS
9 14 (7.25%) Datadog
10 13 (6.74%) Azure AKS
10 13 (6.74%) Google Kubernetes Engine
11 12 (6.22%) SaaS
12 11 (5.70%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 11 (5.70%) Amazon SQS
12 11 (5.70%) GitHub Copilot
13 8 (4.15%) Azure DevOps
14 7 (3.63%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 6 (3.11%) Firewall
2 3 (1.55%) Network Security
2 3 (1.55%) Software-Defined Networking
3 2 (1.04%) AMQP
3 2 (1.04%) DNS
3 2 (1.04%) TCP/IP
4 1 (0.52%) HTTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 24 (12.44%) MongoDB
2 21 (10.88%) PostgreSQL
3 15 (7.77%) NoSQL
4 9 (4.66%) Amazon RDS
5 8 (4.15%) DynamoDB
6 6 (3.11%) Azure SQL Database
7 5 (2.59%) Relational Database
8 4 (2.07%) Elasticsearch
8 4 (2.07%) Neo4j
9 3 (1.55%) Pinecone
9 3 (1.55%) SQL Server
10 2 (1.04%) Amazon Aurora
10 2 (1.04%) Big Data
10 2 (1.04%) Cloudera CDH
10 2 (1.04%) Hadoop
11 1 (0.52%) BigQuery
11 1 (0.52%) Data Warehouse
11 1 (0.52%) Redis
11 1 (0.52%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 29 (15.03%) Git
2 26 (13.47%) Jenkins
3 22 (11.40%) GitLab
4 7 (3.63%) Atlassian Bamboo
5 4 (2.07%) Bitbucket
5 4 (2.07%) Cucumber
5 4 (2.07%) Cypress.io
5 4 (2.07%) Robot Framework
5 4 (2.07%) Vite
6 3 (1.55%) Postman
6 3 (1.55%) Selenium
7 2 (1.04%) Claude Code
7 2 (1.04%) JIRA
8 1 (0.52%) Gemini Tracker
8 1 (0.52%) IntelliJ
8 1 (0.52%) JUnit
8 1 (0.52%) Mocha
8 1 (0.52%) Octopus Deploy
8 1 (0.52%) Vagrant
General
1 19 (9.84%) Social Skills
2 11 (5.70%) Public Sector
3 10 (5.18%) Finance
4 7 (3.63%) Advertising
5 4 (2.07%) Analytical Skills
5 4 (2.07%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 3 (1.55%) Aerospace
7 2 (1.04%) Manufacturing
7 2 (1.04%) Presentation Skills
7 2 (1.04%) Retail
8 1 (0.52%) Front Office
Job Titles
1 56 (29.02%) DevOps Engineer
2 48 (24.87%) Senior
3 33 (17.10%) Cloud Engineer
4 32 (16.58%) Developer
5 28 (14.51%) Software Engineer
6 26 (13.47%) Lead
7 17 (8.81%) Platform Engineer
8 15 (7.77%) Principal Engineer
9 13 (6.74%) Java Developer
10 12 (6.22%) Architect
11 11 (5.70%) Senior Developer
12 10 (5.18%) Cloud Native Engineer
12 10 (5.18%) Senior DevOps
12 10 (5.18%) Senior DevOps Engineer
12 10 (5.18%) Senior Java Developer
13 9 (4.66%) Lead Developer
14 8 (4.15%) Cloud Architect
14 8 (4.15%) Lead Software Engineer
14 8 (4.15%) Senior Platform Engineer
14 8 (4.15%) Senior Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 39 (20.21%) Spring
2 37 (19.17%) Spring Boot
3 27 (13.99%) React
4 23 (11.92%) .NET
5 22 (11.40%) Node.js
6 20 (10.36%) RESTful
7 16 (8.29%) Kafka
8 15 (7.77%) AngularJS
9 14 (7.25%) Vue
10 13 (6.74%) FastAPI
11 9 (4.66%) OpenTelemetry
11 9 (4.66%) RabbitMQ
12 8 (4.15%) Django
12 8 (4.15%) LangChain
12 8 (4.15%) REST
13 7 (3.63%) CSS
14 6 (3.11%) .NET Core
14 6 (3.11%) ASP.NET
14 6 (3.11%) HTML
14 6 (3.11%) ML.NET
Miscellaneous
1 71 (36.79%) Cloud Native
2 26 (13.47%) Distributed Systems
3 9 (4.66%) Hybrid Cloud
4 8 (4.15%) Greenfield Project
5 5 (2.59%) AI Agents
6 4 (2.07%) Enterprise Cloud
6 4 (2.07%) Security Posture
7 3 (1.55%) Cloud Security Posture
7 3 (1.55%) Legacy Systems
7 3 (1.55%) Social Media
8 2 (1.04%) Life Science
8 2 (1.04%) Onboarding
8 2 (1.04%) Product Ownership
8 2 (1.04%) Renewable Energy
9 1 (0.52%) Culture of Ownership
9 1 (0.52%) Management Information System
9 1 (0.52%) Online Gambling
9 1 (0.52%) Public Cloud
9 1 (0.52%) Self-Motivation
9 1 (0.52%) Video\Live Streaming
Operating Systems
1 29 (15.03%) Linux
2 7 (3.63%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 5 (2.59%) CentOS
4 4 (2.07%) Windows
5 3 (1.55%) Debian
5 3 (1.55%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 140 (72.54%) CI/CD
2 126 (65.28%) DevOps
3 103 (53.37%) Infrastructure as Code
4 90 (46.63%) Containerisation
5 66 (34.20%) Agile
6 54 (27.98%) Platform Engineering
7 49 (25.39%) AI
8 48 (24.87%) Software Engineering
9 45 (23.32%) Observability
10 42 (21.76%) Mentoring
10 42 (21.76%) Microservices
11 40 (20.73%) Site Reliability Engineering
12 33 (17.10%) Continuous Improvement
12 33 (17.10%) Problem-Solving
13 27 (13.99%) TDD
14 22 (11.40%) Clean Code
14 22 (11.40%) Scrum
15 21 (10.88%) Cloud Security
15 21 (10.88%) Event-Driven
16 20 (10.36%) Collaborative Culture
Programming Languages
1 76 (39.38%) Python
2 52 (26.94%) Java
3 30 (15.54%) Bash
4 28 (14.51%) TypeScript
5 25 (12.95%) SQL
6 22 (11.40%) C#
6 22 (11.40%) JavaScript
7 18 (9.33%) Go
8 17 (8.81%) PowerShell
9 7 (3.63%) Bicep
10 4 (2.07%) Kotlin
11 3 (1.55%) Scala
12 2 (1.04%) C++
13 1 (0.52%) C
13 1 (0.52%) Objective-C
13 1 (0.52%) Rust
13 1 (0.52%) Shell Script
13 1 (0.52%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 56 (29.02%) Security Cleared
2 32 (16.58%) DV Cleared
3 28 (14.51%) SC Cleared
4 8 (4.15%) Degree
5 7 (3.63%) AWS Certification
5 7 (3.63%) Azure Certification
6 5 (2.59%) Computer Science Degree
7 2 (1.04%) Microsoft Certified Professional
8 1 (0.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 1 (0.52%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (2.07%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 3 (1.55%) PCI DSS
2 3 (1.55%) SOC 2
3 2 (1.04%) QA
4 1 (0.52%) Accessibility
System Software
1 116 (60.10%) Docker
2 4 (2.07%) Virtual Machines
2 4 (2.07%) VMware Infrastructure
3 3 (1.55%) Ceph
4 2 (1.04%) Active Directory
4 2 (1.04%) VMware NSX
5 1 (0.52%) VMware ESXi
5 1 (0.52%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 114 (59.07%) Terraform
2 53 (27.46%) Ansible
3 20 (10.36%) Prometheus
4 19 (9.84%) Grafana
5 12 (6.22%) Argo
5 12 (6.22%) Istio
6 9 (4.66%) Puppet
7 8 (4.15%) linkerd
7 8 (4.15%) Progress Chef
8 3 (1.55%) Check_MK
8 3 (1.55%) Podman
9 1 (0.52%) Microsoft Intune
9 1 (0.52%) Packer
9 1 (0.52%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 17 (8.81%) Google
2 13 (6.74%) Microsoft
3 7 (3.63%) HubSpot
4 6 (3.11%) OpenAI
5 5 (2.59%) Red Hat
5 5 (2.59%) VMware
6 3 (1.55%) Dell
6 3 (1.55%) Dynatrace
6 3 (1.55%) Splunk
7 2 (1.04%) Pega
7 2 (1.04%) SaltStack
7 2 (1.04%) WSO2
8 1 (0.52%) Databricks
8 1 (0.52%) New Relic
8 1 (0.52%) Percona