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

6 months to
12 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 94 66 89
Rank change year-on-year -28 +23 -42
Permanent jobs citing Kubernetes 180 263 233
As % of all permanent jobs in the North West 1.60% 5.11% 2.27%
As % of the Systems Management category 32.85% 23.48% 34.57%
Number of salaries quoted 157 105 134
10th Percentile £47,200 £47,500 £42,500
25th Percentile £58,750 £60,401 £51,563
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £72,500 £75,000 £62,500
Median % change year-on-year -3.33% +20.00% -10.71%
75th Percentile £88,750 £93,778 £79,375
90th Percentile £97,500 £112,500 £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 548 1,120 674
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the North West 4.87% 21.76% 6.56%
Number of salaries quoted 444 278 483
10th Percentile £32,500 £32,000 £29,000
25th Percentile £40,375 £40,620 £38,750
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 £70,000
90th Percentile £90,000 £94,144 £82,500
England median annual salary £65,000 £67,500 £62,500
% change year-on-year -3.70% +8.00% -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 12 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 12 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 -13 147 £72,500 -6.45% 76
Lancashire +7 12 £46,250 +9.77% 12
Merseyside -15 12 £95,000 - 3
Cheshire -48 7 £62,500 +4.17% 11
Cumbria - 1 £85,000 -
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 3 (1.67%) Apache
1 3 (1.67%) Apache Spark
2 2 (1.11%) Microsoft Exchange
2 2 (1.11%) OpenStack
Applications
1 1 (0.56%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 116 (64.44%) AWS
2 75 (41.67%) Azure
3 40 (22.22%) GCP
3 40 (22.22%) GitHub
4 37 (20.56%) Serverless
5 30 (16.67%) AWS CloudFormation
6 17 (9.44%) Amazon EKS
6 17 (9.44%) Azure AKS
6 17 (9.44%) GitHub Actions
7 16 (8.89%) AWS Lambda
8 15 (8.33%) Amazon ECS
9 14 (7.78%) Datadog
10 13 (7.22%) Google Kubernetes Engine
11 11 (6.11%) Amazon SQS
11 11 (6.11%) OpenShift
12 10 (5.56%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 10 (5.56%) GitHub Copilot
13 9 (5.00%) SaaS
14 8 (4.44%) Azure DevOps
15 7 (3.89%) Amazon EventBridge
Communications & Networking
1 7 (3.89%) Firewall
2 3 (1.67%) AMQP
2 3 (1.67%) Network Security
3 2 (1.11%) DNS
3 2 (1.11%) TCP/IP
4 1 (0.56%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 27 (15.00%) MongoDB
2 25 (13.89%) PostgreSQL
3 17 (9.44%) NoSQL
4 8 (4.44%) Amazon RDS
4 8 (4.44%) DynamoDB
5 6 (3.33%) Azure SQL Database
5 6 (3.33%) Elasticsearch
6 5 (2.78%) Neo4j
6 5 (2.78%) Relational Database
7 3 (1.67%) Big Data
7 3 (1.67%) Cloudera CDH
7 3 (1.67%) Hadoop
7 3 (1.67%) Pinecone
8 2 (1.11%) SQL Server
9 1 (0.56%) BigQuery
9 1 (0.56%) Data Warehouse
9 1 (0.56%) MySQL
9 1 (0.56%) Redis
9 1 (0.56%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 25 (13.89%) Git
1 25 (13.89%) Jenkins
2 22 (12.22%) GitLab
3 7 (3.89%) Atlassian Bamboo
4 5 (2.78%) Bitbucket
5 4 (2.22%) Cucumber
5 4 (2.22%) Cypress.io
5 4 (2.22%) Robot Framework
5 4 (2.22%) Vite
6 3 (1.67%) Postman
6 3 (1.67%) Selenium
7 2 (1.11%) Claude Code
7 2 (1.11%) JIRA
7 2 (1.11%) Vagrant
8 1 (0.56%) Gemini Tracker
8 1 (0.56%) IntelliJ
8 1 (0.56%) JUnit
8 1 (0.56%) Mocha
General
1 16 (8.89%) Social Skills
2 10 (5.56%) Public Sector
3 7 (3.89%) Advertising
3 7 (3.89%) Finance
4 4 (2.22%) Aerospace
5 3 (1.67%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 2 (1.11%) Retail
7 1 (0.56%) Analytical Skills
Job Titles
1 51 (28.33%) DevOps Engineer
1 51 (28.33%) Senior
2 32 (17.78%) Software Engineer
3 31 (17.22%) Developer
4 30 (16.67%) Cloud Engineer
5 23 (12.78%) Lead
6 17 (9.44%) Platform Engineer
7 14 (7.78%) Java Developer
8 13 (7.22%) Principal Engineer
9 11 (6.11%) Senior Developer
9 11 (6.11%) Senior Java Developer
10 9 (5.00%) Architect
10 9 (5.00%) Azure Engineer
10 9 (5.00%) Cloud Native Engineer
10 9 (5.00%) Senior DevOps
10 9 (5.00%) Senior DevOps Engineer
10 9 (5.00%) Senior Platform Engineer
10 9 (5.00%) Senior Software Engineer
11 8 (4.44%) Cloud Architect
11 8 (4.44%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 37 (20.56%) Spring
2 35 (19.44%) Spring Boot
3 28 (15.56%) React
4 23 (12.78%) RESTful
5 22 (12.22%) Node.js
6 21 (11.67%) .NET
7 16 (8.89%) Kafka
8 15 (8.33%) AngularJS
8 15 (8.33%) Vue
9 14 (7.78%) FastAPI
10 10 (5.56%) Django
10 10 (5.56%) RabbitMQ
11 8 (4.44%) LangChain
11 8 (4.44%) OpenTelemetry
11 8 (4.44%) REST
12 7 (3.89%) CSS
13 6 (3.33%) .NET Framework
13 6 (3.33%) ASP.NET
13 6 (3.33%) Hibernate
13 6 (3.33%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 65 (36.11%) Cloud Native
2 25 (13.89%) Distributed Systems
3 8 (4.44%) Hybrid Cloud
4 7 (3.89%) Greenfield Project
5 5 (2.78%) AI Agents
6 4 (2.22%) Enterprise Cloud
6 4 (2.22%) Security Posture
7 3 (1.67%) Cloud Security Posture
8 2 (1.11%) Legacy Systems
8 2 (1.11%) Mobile App
8 2 (1.11%) Product Ownership
8 2 (1.11%) Public Cloud
8 2 (1.11%) Self-Motivation
9 1 (0.56%) Culture of Ownership
Operating Systems
1 28 (15.56%) Linux
2 8 (4.44%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 6 (3.33%) CentOS
4 5 (2.78%) Debian
4 5 (2.78%) Ubuntu
5 4 (2.22%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 132 (73.33%) CI/CD
2 120 (66.67%) DevOps
3 100 (55.56%) Infrastructure as Code
4 91 (50.56%) Containerisation
5 62 (34.44%) Agile
6 52 (28.89%) Platform Engineering
7 46 (25.56%) AI
8 45 (25.00%) Software Engineering
9 41 (22.78%) Observability
10 40 (22.22%) Microservices
11 37 (20.56%) Mentoring
12 35 (19.44%) Continuous Improvement
12 35 (19.44%) Problem-Solving
13 32 (17.78%) Site Reliability Engineering
14 30 (16.67%) TDD
15 25 (13.89%) Clean Code
16 24 (13.33%) Scrum
17 22 (12.22%) Collaborative Culture
18 20 (11.11%) Event-Driven
19 19 (10.56%) Cloud Security
Programming Languages
1 70 (38.89%) Python
2 49 (27.22%) Java
3 30 (16.67%) TypeScript
4 26 (14.44%) SQL
5 23 (12.78%) Bash
6 21 (11.67%) JavaScript
7 20 (11.11%) C#
8 16 (8.89%) PowerShell
9 14 (7.78%) Go
10 7 (3.89%) Bicep
11 3 (1.67%) Kotlin
11 3 (1.67%) Scala
12 2 (1.11%) C
Qualifications
1 51 (28.33%) Security Cleared
2 28 (15.56%) SC Cleared
3 27 (15.00%) DV Cleared
4 6 (3.33%) Azure Certification
4 6 (3.33%) Degree
5 5 (2.78%) Computer Science Degree
6 3 (1.67%) AWS Certification
7 2 (1.11%) Microsoft Certified Professional
8 1 (0.56%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (2.22%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 3 (1.67%) PCI DSS
2 3 (1.67%) SOC 2
3 1 (0.56%) Accessibility
3 1 (0.56%) QA
System Software
1 106 (58.89%) Docker
2 5 (2.78%) Virtual Machines
3 4 (2.22%) VMware Infrastructure
4 2 (1.11%) Active Directory
4 2 (1.11%) VMware NSX
4 2 (1.11%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 107 (59.44%) Terraform
2 44 (24.44%) Ansible
3 16 (8.89%) Grafana
4 14 (7.78%) Prometheus
5 8 (4.44%) Argo
5 8 (4.44%) Istio
6 7 (3.89%) linkerd
7 5 (2.78%) Puppet
8 4 (2.22%) Progress Chef
9 2 (1.11%) Microsoft Intune
9 2 (1.11%) Packer
10 1 (0.56%) Rancher
Vendors
1 15 (8.33%) Google
2 12 (6.67%) Microsoft
3 7 (3.89%) HubSpot
4 6 (3.33%) OpenAI
5 5 (2.78%) VMware
6 3 (1.67%) Dynatrace
6 3 (1.67%) Red Hat
6 3 (1.67%) SaltStack
6 3 (1.67%) Splunk
7 2 (1.11%) Pega
7 2 (1.11%) WSO2
8 1 (0.56%) Databricks