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

6 months to
12 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 88 74 66
Rank change year-on-year -14 -8 -41
Permanent jobs citing Kubernetes 199 232 221
As % of all permanent jobs in the North West 1.59% 4.50% 2.83%
As % of the Systems Management category 41.89% 22.77% 44.11%
Number of salaries quoted 159 78 81
10th Percentile £46,750 £52,500 £42,500
25th Percentile £56,875 £59,750 £52,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £72,500 £68,750 £62,500
Median % change year-on-year +5.45% +10.00% -16.67%
75th Percentile £88,148 £83,875 £75,000
90th Percentile £97,500 £97,875 £85,000
England median annual salary £70,000 £80,000 £77,500
% change year-on-year -12.50% +3.23% +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 475 1,019 501
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the North West 3.79% 19.77% 6.41%
Number of salaries quoted 356 203 241
10th Percentile £31,875 £26,050 £31,250
25th Percentile £38,750 £33,125 £37,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £57,808 £53,750 £50,000
Median % change year-on-year +7.55% +7.50% -23.49%
75th Percentile £77,500 £70,000 £67,500
90th Percentile £90,000 £87,500 £76,250
England median annual salary £60,000 £62,500 £65,000
% change year-on-year -4.00% -3.85% -

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 12 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 12 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 -18 163 £72,500 +3.57% 122
Lancashire +3 14 £51,065 -15.60% 20
Merseyside -12 12 £95,000 +46.15% 1
Cheshire -49 9 £62,500 -13.79% 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 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 73 (36.68%) Azure
3 44 (22.11%) GitHub
4 43 (21.61%) GCP
5 37 (18.59%) Serverless
6 31 (15.58%) AWS CloudFormation
7 21 (10.55%) OpenShift
8 19 (9.55%) AWS Lambda
8 19 (9.55%) GitHub Actions
9 15 (7.54%) Amazon ECS
10 14 (7.04%) Datadog
11 12 (6.03%) Google Kubernetes Engine
11 12 (6.03%) SaaS
12 11 (5.53%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 11 (5.53%) GitHub Copilot
13 10 (5.03%) Amazon EKS
13 10 (5.03%) Amazon SQS
13 10 (5.03%) Azure AKS
13 10 (5.03%) Azure DevOps
14 9 (4.52%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 4 (2.01%) Firewall
2 3 (1.51%) AMQP
2 3 (1.51%) Network Security
2 3 (1.51%) Software-Defined Networking
3 1 (0.50%) DNS
3 1 (0.50%) HTTP
3 1 (0.50%) TCP/IP
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 27 (13.57%) Jenkins
3 25 (12.56%) 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 23 (11.56%) 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 61 (30.65%) DevOps Engineer
2 52 (26.13%) 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 12 (6.03%) Java Developer
9 12 (6.03%) Senior Developer
10 11 (5.53%) Cloud Native Engineer
10 11 (5.53%) Senior DevOps
10 11 (5.53%) Senior DevOps Engineer
10 11 (5.53%) Senior Software Engineer
11 10 (5.03%) Lead Developer
11 10 (5.03%) Principal DevOps Engineer
11 10 (5.03%) Senior Java Developer
12 8 (4.02%) Cloud Architect
12 8 (4.02%) Lead DevOps
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 120 (60.30%) Terraform
2 47 (23.62%) Spring
3 45 (22.61%) Spring Boot
4 35 (17.59%) React
5 25 (12.56%) Node.js
6 23 (11.56%) Kafka
7 16 (8.04%) .NET
7 16 (8.04%) AngularJS
8 15 (7.54%) RESTful
9 13 (6.53%) Vue
10 12 (6.03%) REST
11 11 (5.53%) FastAPI
12 10 (5.03%) RabbitMQ
13 9 (4.52%) OpenTelemetry
14 8 (4.02%) LangChain
15 7 (3.52%) CSS
15 7 (3.52%) OpenAPI
15 7 (3.52%) Swagger
16 6 (3.02%) ASP.NET
16 6 (3.02%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 69 (34.67%) Cloud Native
2 24 (12.06%) 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 32 (16.08%) 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
1 146 (73.37%) CI/CD
2 127 (63.82%) DevOps
3 105 (52.76%) Infrastructure as Code
4 95 (47.74%) Containerisation
5 71 (35.68%) Agile
6 55 (27.64%) Platform Engineering
7 54 (27.14%) AI
8 51 (25.63%) Software Engineering
9 50 (25.13%) Observability
10 48 (24.12%) Mentoring
11 47 (23.62%) Microservices
12 43 (21.61%) Site Reliability Engineering
13 41 (20.60%) Continuous Improvement
14 37 (18.59%) Problem-Solving
15 26 (13.07%) Event-Driven
16 23 (11.56%) TDD
17 21 (10.55%) Cloud Security
17 21 (10.55%) Scrum
18 19 (9.55%) Stakeholder Management
18 19 (9.55%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 82 (41.21%) Python
2 62 (31.16%) Java
3 36 (18.09%) TypeScript
4 34 (17.09%) Bash
5 28 (14.07%) JavaScript
6 22 (11.06%) SQL
7 19 (9.55%) PowerShell
8 17 (8.54%) Go
9 16 (8.04%) C#
10 9 (4.52%) Bicep
11 4 (2.01%) Kotlin
11 4 (2.01%) Rust
11 4 (2.01%) Scala
12 3 (1.51%) C++
13 2 (1.01%) Shell Script
14 1 (0.50%) C
14 1 (0.50%) Objective-C
14 1 (0.50%) PL/SQL
14 1 (0.50%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 64 (32.16%) Security Cleared
2 38 (19.10%) DV Cleared
3 33 (16.58%) 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
1 125 (62.81%) 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 57 (28.64%) Ansible
2 19 (9.55%) Prometheus
3 18 (9.05%) Grafana
4 12 (6.03%) Argo
4 12 (6.03%) Istio
5 10 (5.03%) Puppet
6 9 (4.52%) Progress Chef
7 8 (4.02%) linkerd
8 3 (1.51%) Check_MK
8 3 (1.51%) Podman
8 3 (1.51%) Single Sign-On
9 2 (1.01%) Packer
10 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