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

6 months to
15 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 104 78 88
Rank change year-on-year -26 +10 -30
Permanent jobs citing Kubernetes 123 132 234
As % of all permanent jobs in the North West 1.27% 3.57% 2.61%
As % of the Systems Management category 28.60% 29.86% 37.86%
Number of salaries quoted 97 110 186
10th Percentile £55,750 £48,625 £47,500
25th Percentile £60,000 £62,500 £53,750
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £70,000 £78,155 £62,500
Median % change year-on-year -10.43% +25.05% -7.41%
75th Percentile £85,000 £93,778 £77,500
90th Percentile £95,000 £112,500 £84,919
England median annual salary £75,000 £85,000 £77,500
% change year-on-year -11.76% +9.68% -

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 430 442 618
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the North West 4.45% 11.95% 6.89%
Number of salaries quoted 320 279 523
10th Percentile £29,900 £36,250 £29,250
25th Percentile £40,000 £46,740 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £57,500 £67,500 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year -14.81% +17.39% -
75th Percentile £75,000 £78,750 £71,250
90th Percentile £87,565 £94,022 £80,000
England median annual salary £65,000 £70,000 £60,000
% change year-on-year -7.14% +16.67% -11.11%

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 April 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 April 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 -20 98 £67,500 -14.35% 57
Cumbria - 7 £85,000 - 1
Cheshire -39 6 £72,500 -7.94% 4
Merseyside - 6 £95,000 - 4
Lancashire -1 4 £78,750 +86.90% 20
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 (4.07%) Apache
1 5 (4.07%) Apache Spark
2 4 (3.25%) Microsoft Exchange
2 4 (3.25%) OpenStack
3 2 (1.63%) nginx
4 1 (0.81%) SharePoint
Applications
1 1 (0.81%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 78 (63.41%) AWS
2 55 (44.72%) Azure
3 31 (25.20%) GCP
4 27 (21.95%) Serverless
5 23 (18.70%) Azure AKS
6 22 (17.89%) AWS CloudFormation
7 20 (16.26%) Amazon EKS
8 17 (13.82%) GitHub
9 13 (10.57%) GitHub Actions
10 12 (9.76%) Amazon ECS
11 11 (8.94%) AWS Lambda
12 9 (7.32%) Azure DevOps
12 9 (7.32%) Datadog
12 9 (7.32%) OpenShift
13 7 (5.69%) Amazon EC2
13 7 (5.69%) Entra ID
13 7 (5.69%) Google Kubernetes Engine
14 6 (4.88%) Amazon S3
15 4 (3.25%) Amazon SQS
15 4 (3.25%) Microsoft 365
Communications & Networking
1 8 (6.50%) Firewall
2 7 (5.69%) Internet
3 5 (4.07%) AMQP
4 3 (2.44%) DNS
4 3 (2.44%) TCP/IP
5 2 (1.63%) VPN
6 1 (0.81%) DHCP
6 1 (0.81%) Network Security
6 1 (0.81%) SD-WAN
6 1 (0.81%) VLAN
6 1 (0.81%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 28 (22.76%) NoSQL
2 25 (20.33%) PostgreSQL
3 23 (18.70%) MongoDB
4 7 (5.69%) Elasticsearch
4 7 (5.69%) MySQL
5 6 (4.88%) DynamoDB
6 5 (4.07%) Big Data
6 5 (4.07%) Cloudera CDH
6 5 (4.07%) Hadoop
6 5 (4.07%) Relational Database
6 5 (4.07%) SQL Server
7 4 (3.25%) Amazon RDS
7 4 (3.25%) Neo4j
8 2 (1.63%) BigQuery
8 2 (1.63%) Data Warehouse
8 2 (1.63%) PostHog
8 2 (1.63%) Redis
9 1 (0.81%) Azure SQL Database
9 1 (0.81%) DB2
Development Applications
1 20 (16.26%) Git
2 11 (8.94%) GitLab
3 9 (7.32%) Jenkins
4 3 (2.44%) Bitbucket
5 2 (1.63%) Vagrant
6 1 (0.81%) Claude Code
6 1 (0.81%) Cucumber
6 1 (0.81%) IntelliJ
6 1 (0.81%) JMeter
6 1 (0.81%) JUnit
6 1 (0.81%) Locust
6 1 (0.81%) TeamCity
General
1 18 (14.63%) Social Skills
2 5 (4.07%) Aerospace
3 4 (3.25%) Analytical Skills
3 4 (3.25%) Finance
3 4 (3.25%) Retail
4 3 (2.44%) Public Sector
5 2 (1.63%) Banking
6 1 (0.81%) Advertising
6 1 (0.81%) Investment Banking
6 1 (0.81%) Tech for Good
Job Titles
1 40 (32.52%) Software Engineer
2 37 (30.08%) Senior
3 20 (16.26%) Lead
4 17 (13.82%) Cloud Engineer
5 16 (13.01%) Developer
6 15 (12.20%) DevOps Engineer
7 12 (9.76%) Senior Software Engineer
8 10 (8.13%) .NET Software Engineer
8 10 (8.13%) Lead Software Engineer
8 10 (8.13%) Python Engineer
9 9 (7.32%) Java Developer
10 8 (6.50%) Azure Engineer
11 7 (5.69%) Infrastructure Engineer
11 7 (5.69%) Senior Developer
12 6 (4.88%) DV Cleared Software Engineer
12 6 (4.88%) Platform Engineer
12 6 (4.88%) Senior .NET Software Engineer
13 5 (4.07%) Java Engineer
13 5 (4.07%) Python Software Engineer
13 5 (4.07%) Site Reliability Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 23 (18.70%) .NET
1 23 (18.70%) Spring
2 21 (17.07%) React
2 21 (17.07%) Spring Boot
3 20 (16.26%) RESTful
4 15 (12.20%) .NET Framework
5 12 (9.76%) Node.js
6 11 (8.94%) AngularJS
7 10 (8.13%) Django
7 10 (8.13%) FastAPI
8 9 (7.32%) RabbitMQ
9 7 (5.69%) REST
10 6 (4.88%) ARM Templates
10 6 (4.88%) Vue
11 5 (4.07%) Celery
11 5 (4.07%) Flask
11 5 (4.07%) gRPC
11 5 (4.07%) Material-UI
11 5 (4.07%) OpenAPI
11 5 (4.07%) Swagger
Miscellaneous
1 43 (34.96%) Cloud Native
2 24 (19.51%) Distributed Systems
3 7 (5.69%) Distributed Computing
4 6 (4.88%) Hybrid Cloud
5 4 (3.25%) Enterprise Cloud
5 4 (3.25%) Public Cloud
6 2 (1.63%) Driving Licence
6 2 (1.63%) Legacy Systems
6 2 (1.63%) Mobile App
6 2 (1.63%) Product Ownership
6 2 (1.63%) Self-Motivation
7 1 (0.81%) AI Agents
7 1 (0.81%) Analytical Mindset
7 1 (0.81%) Cyber Threat
7 1 (0.81%) Cybercrime
7 1 (0.81%) Data Structures
7 1 (0.81%) NVMe
7 1 (0.81%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 28 (22.76%) Linux
2 8 (6.50%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 7 (5.69%) Debian
3 7 (5.69%) Ubuntu
4 6 (4.88%) CentOS
5 4 (3.25%) Windows
6 2 (1.63%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 88 (71.54%) CI/CD
2 76 (61.79%) DevOps
3 67 (54.47%) Containerisation
4 66 (53.66%) Infrastructure as Code
5 50 (40.65%) Agile
6 47 (38.21%) Software Engineering
7 43 (34.96%) Microservices
8 28 (22.76%) TDD
9 27 (21.95%) Clean Code
9 27 (21.95%) Observability
10 24 (19.51%) Problem-Solving
11 23 (18.70%) Continuous Improvement
11 23 (18.70%) Scrum
12 22 (17.89%) Mentoring
12 22 (17.89%) Platform Engineering
13 19 (15.45%) Event-Driven
13 19 (15.45%) Infrastructure Engineering
14 16 (13.01%) AI
14 16 (13.01%) Collaborative Culture
15 15 (12.20%) Event-Driven Architecture
Programming Languages
1 51 (41.46%) Python
2 34 (27.64%) Java
3 32 (26.02%) SQL
4 27 (21.95%) TypeScript
5 21 (17.07%) C#
6 16 (13.01%) JavaScript
7 14 (11.38%) Go
8 11 (8.94%) C
9 8 (6.50%) PowerShell
10 5 (4.07%) Bash
11 4 (3.25%) Bicep
12 1 (0.81%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 18 (14.63%) Security Cleared
2 12 (9.76%) SC Cleared
3 11 (8.94%) DV Cleared
4 6 (4.88%) Azure Certification
4 6 (4.88%) Degree
5 5 (4.07%) Computer Science Degree
6 1 (0.81%) AWS Certification
6 1 (0.81%) CISM
6 1 (0.81%) CISSP
6 1 (0.81%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
6 1 (0.81%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 3 (2.44%) QA
2 1 (0.81%) Accessibility
2 1 (0.81%) Data Quality
2 1 (0.81%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 1 (0.81%) NIST
2 1 (0.81%) PCI DSS
2 1 (0.81%) WCAG
System Software
1 67 (54.47%) Docker
2 6 (4.88%) Active Directory
2 6 (4.88%) Virtual Machines
3 5 (4.07%) VMware Infrastructure
3 5 (4.07%) vSphere
4 4 (3.25%) VMware NSX
5 1 (0.81%) Firmware
5 1 (0.81%) Hyper-V
5 1 (0.81%) KVM
5 1 (0.81%) QEMU
5 1 (0.81%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 66 (53.66%) Terraform
2 34 (27.64%) Ansible
3 9 (7.32%) Grafana
4 6 (4.88%) Prometheus
5 5 (4.07%) Puppet
6 4 (3.25%) Microsoft Intune
7 3 (2.44%) Rancher
8 2 (1.63%) Nagios
8 2 (1.63%) Packer
8 2 (1.63%) Progress Chef
9 1 (0.81%) Argo
9 1 (0.81%) Fluentd
9 1 (0.81%) FortiGate
9 1 (0.81%) Istio
Vendors
1 9 (7.32%) Google
2 8 (6.50%) Microsoft
3 7 (5.69%) VMware
4 6 (4.88%) Red Hat
4 6 (4.88%) SaltStack
5 3 (2.44%) HubSpot
6 2 (1.63%) Pega
6 2 (1.63%) WSO2
7 1 (0.81%) Cribl.io
7 1 (0.81%) Databricks
7 1 (0.81%) Dell
7 1 (0.81%) F5
7 1 (0.81%) Fortinet
7 1 (0.81%) Oracle
7 1 (0.81%) Palo Alto
7 1 (0.81%) Splunk