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

6 months to
18 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 92 72 87
Rank change year-on-year -20 +15 -41
Permanent jobs citing Kubernetes 177 254 229
As % of all permanent jobs in the North West 1.57% 4.97% 2.31%
As % of the Systems Management category 33.08% 23.11% 34.44%
Number of salaries quoted 156 96 130
10th Percentile £47,125 £46,625 £42,500
25th Percentile £57,500 £58,813 £51,563
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £71,500 £74,750 £62,500
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% +19.60% -10.71%
75th Percentile £87,813 £93,778 £80,938
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 535 1,099 665
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the North West 4.73% 21.49% 6.70%
Number of salaries quoted 436 260 475
10th Percentile £32,500 £29,800 £29,100
25th Percentile £40,500 £40,000 £39,720
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £62,500 £65,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% +18.18% -12.00%
75th Percentile £79,217 £77,500 £70,875
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 18 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 18 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 -11 144 £71,500 -4.67% 56
Lancashire +3 12 £46,250 +9.77% 9
Merseyside -17 12 £95,000 - 1
Cheshire -46 8 £62,500 +4.17% 7
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 (1.13%) Apache
1 2 (1.13%) Apache Spark
1 2 (1.13%) Microsoft Exchange
1 2 (1.13%) OpenStack
Applications
1 1 (0.56%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 113 (63.84%) AWS
2 73 (41.24%) Azure
3 39 (22.03%) GitHub
4 36 (20.34%) GCP
4 36 (20.34%) Serverless
5 29 (16.38%) AWS CloudFormation
6 17 (9.60%) GitHub Actions
7 16 (9.04%) Azure AKS
8 15 (8.47%) Amazon EKS
8 15 (8.47%) AWS Lambda
9 14 (7.91%) Amazon ECS
9 14 (7.91%) Datadog
10 11 (6.21%) Amazon SQS
10 11 (6.21%) Google Kubernetes Engine
11 10 (5.65%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 10 (5.65%) GitHub Copilot
12 9 (5.08%) OpenShift
12 9 (5.08%) SaaS
13 8 (4.52%) Azure DevOps
14 7 (3.95%) Amazon EventBridge
Communications & Networking
1 7 (3.95%) Firewall
2 3 (1.69%) Network Security
3 2 (1.13%) AMQP
3 2 (1.13%) DNS
3 2 (1.13%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 25 (14.12%) MongoDB
2 22 (12.43%) PostgreSQL
3 16 (9.04%) NoSQL
4 8 (4.52%) Amazon RDS
5 7 (3.95%) DynamoDB
6 6 (3.39%) Azure SQL Database
7 5 (2.82%) Elasticsearch
7 5 (2.82%) Neo4j
7 5 (2.82%) Relational Database
8 3 (1.69%) Pinecone
9 2 (1.13%) Big Data
9 2 (1.13%) Cloudera CDH
9 2 (1.13%) Hadoop
9 2 (1.13%) SQL Server
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 (13.56%) Jenkins
2 23 (12.99%) Git
3 21 (11.86%) GitLab
4 7 (3.95%) Atlassian Bamboo
5 4 (2.26%) Bitbucket
5 4 (2.26%) Cucumber
5 4 (2.26%) Cypress.io
5 4 (2.26%) Robot Framework
5 4 (2.26%) Vite
6 3 (1.69%) Postman
6 3 (1.69%) Selenium
7 2 (1.13%) Claude Code
7 2 (1.13%) JIRA
7 2 (1.13%) Vagrant
8 1 (0.56%) Gemini Tracker
8 1 (0.56%) IntelliJ
8 1 (0.56%) JUnit
8 1 (0.56%) Mocha
General
1 15 (8.47%) Social Skills
2 10 (5.65%) Public Sector
3 8 (4.52%) Finance
4 7 (3.95%) Advertising
5 3 (1.69%) Aerospace
5 3 (1.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 2 (1.13%) Retail
7 1 (0.56%) Analytical Skills
7 1 (0.56%) Front Office
Job Titles
1 52 (29.38%) DevOps Engineer
2 49 (27.68%) Senior
3 32 (18.08%) Software Engineer
4 31 (17.51%) Developer
5 30 (16.95%) Cloud Engineer
6 23 (12.99%) Lead
7 16 (9.04%) Platform Engineer
8 14 (7.91%) Java Developer
9 13 (7.34%) Principal Engineer
10 11 (6.21%) Senior Developer
10 11 (6.21%) Senior Java Developer
11 10 (5.65%) Cloud Native Engineer
11 10 (5.65%) Senior Software Engineer
12 9 (5.08%) Architect
12 9 (5.08%) Azure Engineer
12 9 (5.08%) Senior DevOps
12 9 (5.08%) Senior DevOps Engineer
13 8 (4.52%) Cloud Architect
13 8 (4.52%) Lead Developer
13 8 (4.52%) Lead Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 36 (20.34%) Spring
2 34 (19.21%) Spring Boot
3 28 (15.82%) React
4 22 (12.43%) .NET
4 22 (12.43%) RESTful
5 21 (11.86%) Node.js
6 16 (9.04%) Kafka
7 15 (8.47%) AngularJS
7 15 (8.47%) Vue
8 14 (7.91%) FastAPI
9 9 (5.08%) Django
9 9 (5.08%) RabbitMQ
10 8 (4.52%) LangChain
10 8 (4.52%) OpenTelemetry
11 7 (3.95%) CSS
11 7 (3.95%) REST
12 6 (3.39%) .NET Framework
12 6 (3.39%) ASP.NET
12 6 (3.39%) Hibernate
12 6 (3.39%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 65 (36.72%) Cloud Native
2 26 (14.69%) Distributed Systems
3 8 (4.52%) Hybrid Cloud
4 7 (3.95%) Greenfield Project
5 5 (2.82%) AI Agents
6 4 (2.26%) Enterprise Cloud
6 4 (2.26%) Security Posture
7 3 (1.69%) Cloud Security Posture
8 2 (1.13%) Legacy Systems
8 2 (1.13%) Mobile App
8 2 (1.13%) Product Ownership
8 2 (1.13%) Self-Motivation
9 1 (0.56%) Culture of Ownership
9 1 (0.56%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 24 (13.56%) Linux
2 7 (3.95%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 5 (2.82%) CentOS
4 4 (2.26%) Debian
4 4 (2.26%) Ubuntu
5 3 (1.69%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 130 (73.45%) CI/CD
2 119 (67.23%) DevOps
3 94 (53.11%) Infrastructure as Code
4 88 (49.72%) Containerisation
5 61 (34.46%) Agile
6 51 (28.81%) Platform Engineering
7 45 (25.42%) AI
7 45 (25.42%) Software Engineering
8 41 (23.16%) Observability
9 39 (22.03%) Microservices
10 38 (21.47%) Mentoring
11 35 (19.77%) Continuous Improvement
12 34 (19.21%) Problem-Solving
12 34 (19.21%) Site Reliability Engineering
13 29 (16.38%) TDD
14 25 (14.12%) Clean Code
15 23 (12.99%) Scrum
16 21 (11.86%) Collaborative Culture
17 20 (11.30%) Event-Driven
18 19 (10.73%) Cloud Security
Programming Languages
1 66 (37.29%) Python
2 47 (26.55%) Java
3 29 (16.38%) TypeScript
4 25 (14.12%) SQL
5 24 (13.56%) Bash
6 21 (11.86%) C#
7 20 (11.30%) JavaScript
8 16 (9.04%) PowerShell
9 12 (6.78%) Go
10 7 (3.95%) Bicep
11 3 (1.69%) Kotlin
11 3 (1.69%) Scala
12 1 (0.56%) C
12 1 (0.56%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 51 (28.81%) Security Cleared
2 28 (15.82%) SC Cleared
3 27 (15.25%) DV Cleared
4 6 (3.39%) Azure Certification
4 6 (3.39%) Degree
5 5 (2.82%) Computer Science Degree
6 3 (1.69%) AWS Certification
7 2 (1.13%) Microsoft Certified Professional
8 1 (0.56%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (2.26%) 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 (59.32%) Docker
2 4 (2.26%) Virtual Machines
3 3 (1.69%) VMware Infrastructure
4 2 (1.13%) Active Directory
5 1 (0.56%) VMware NSX
5 1 (0.56%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 103 (58.19%) Terraform
2 42 (23.73%) Ansible
3 17 (9.60%) Grafana
4 15 (8.47%) Prometheus
5 8 (4.52%) Argo
5 8 (4.52%) Istio
6 7 (3.95%) linkerd
7 5 (2.82%) Progress Chef
8 4 (2.26%) Puppet
9 2 (1.13%) Microsoft Intune
9 2 (1.13%) Packer
Vendors
1 13 (7.34%) Google
2 12 (6.78%) Microsoft
3 7 (3.95%) HubSpot
4 6 (3.39%) OpenAI
5 4 (2.26%) VMware
6 3 (1.69%) Dynatrace
6 3 (1.69%) Splunk
7 2 (1.13%) Pega
7 2 (1.13%) Red Hat
7 2 (1.13%) SaltStack
7 2 (1.13%) WSO2
8 1 (0.56%) Databricks
8 1 (0.56%) Percona