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

6 months to
13 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 88 80 67
Rank change year-on-year -8 -13 -40
Permanent jobs citing Kubernetes 222 217 217
As % of all permanent jobs in the North West 1.73% 4.25% 3.00%
As % of the Systems Management category 40.66% 23.48% 42.55%
Number of salaries quoted 166 67 82
10th Percentile £46,250 £52,000 £42,500
25th Percentile £57,500 £57,500 £52,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £72,500 £65,000 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year +11.54% +8.33% -17.24%
75th Percentile £88,600 £80,000 £75,000
90th Percentile £96,875 £88,100 £87,250
England median annual salary £70,466 £77,500 £77,500
% change year-on-year -9.08% - +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 546 924 510
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the North West 4.25% 18.09% 7.06%
Number of salaries quoted 401 204 238
10th Percentile £33,000 £26,250 £31,600
25th Percentile £42,215 £33,125 £39,813
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £48,720 £50,000
Median % change year-on-year +12.89% -2.56% -21.88%
75th Percentile £75,000 £67,500 £67,500
90th Percentile £90,000 £81,250 £77,500
England median annual salary £60,000 £60,000 £65,000
% change year-on-year - -7.69% -

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 13 October 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 13 October 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 -7 183 £75,000 +11.11% 136
Lancashire +4 15 £52,130 -13.83% 9
Cheshire -47 12 £71,250 +5.56% 12
Merseyside -10 10 £77,500 +19.23% 8
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 6 (2.70%) Apache Spark
2 5 (2.25%) Apache
3 4 (1.80%) Apache Airflow
4 3 (1.35%) OpenStack
5 2 (0.90%) Confluence
6 1 (0.45%) IIS
Cloud Services
1 139 (62.61%) AWS
2 71 (31.98%) Azure
3 49 (22.07%) GitHub
4 41 (18.47%) GCP
5 35 (15.77%) Serverless
6 29 (13.06%) AWS CloudFormation
7 21 (9.46%) OpenShift
8 18 (8.11%) AWS Lambda
9 17 (7.66%) GitHub Actions
10 13 (5.86%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 12 (5.41%) GitHub Copilot
11 12 (5.41%) SaaS
12 11 (4.95%) Google Kubernetes Engine
13 10 (4.50%) Amazon ECS
13 10 (4.50%) Azure AKS
14 8 (3.60%) Amazon S3
15 7 (3.15%) Amazon SQS
15 7 (3.15%) Azure DevOps
15 7 (3.15%) Datadog
15 7 (3.15%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 4 (1.80%) Firewall
2 3 (1.35%) AMQP
2 3 (1.35%) DNS
2 3 (1.35%) Network Security
2 3 (1.35%) Software-Defined Networking
3 1 (0.45%) DHCP
3 1 (0.45%) HTTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 28 (12.61%) MongoDB
2 19 (8.56%) PostgreSQL
3 10 (4.50%) Amazon RDS
4 9 (4.05%) NoSQL
5 6 (2.70%) Azure SQL Database
6 5 (2.25%) Chroma
6 5 (2.25%) DynamoDB
6 5 (2.25%) Elasticsearch
6 5 (2.25%) Neo4j
6 5 (2.25%) Pinecone
7 3 (1.35%) Amazon Athena
7 3 (1.35%) Amazon Redshift
7 3 (1.35%) Big Data
7 3 (1.35%) Data Warehouse
7 3 (1.35%) Power BI
7 3 (1.35%) Power Query
7 3 (1.35%) Redis
8 2 (0.90%) Amazon Aurora
8 2 (0.90%) Cloudera CDH
8 2 (0.90%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 38 (17.12%) Git
2 35 (15.77%) GitLab
3 31 (13.96%) Jenkins
4 10 (4.50%) Atlassian Bamboo
5 6 (2.70%) JIRA
6 5 (2.25%) Cypress.io
7 4 (1.80%) Artifactory
7 4 (1.80%) Bitbucket
7 4 (1.80%) Cucumber
7 4 (1.80%) Robot Framework
7 4 (1.80%) Vagrant
7 4 (1.80%) Vite
8 3 (1.35%) Postman
8 3 (1.35%) Selenium
9 2 (0.90%) Claude Code
9 2 (0.90%) Mocha
10 1 (0.45%) Gemini Tracker
10 1 (0.45%) Maven
10 1 (0.45%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 36 (16.22%) Social Skills
2 19 (8.56%) Public Sector
3 12 (5.41%) Publishing
4 11 (4.95%) Finance
5 8 (3.60%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 6 (2.70%) Advertising
7 5 (2.25%) Aerospace
8 4 (1.80%) Analytical Skills
9 2 (0.90%) Manufacturing
9 2 (0.90%) Presentation Skills
10 1 (0.45%) Front Office
10 1 (0.45%) iGaming
Job Titles
1 77 (34.68%) DevOps Engineer
2 57 (25.68%) Senior
3 35 (15.77%) Developer
4 32 (14.41%) Lead
5 31 (13.96%) Software Engineer
6 27 (12.16%) Cloud Engineer
7 20 (9.01%) Principal Engineer
8 18 (8.11%) Platform Engineer
9 15 (6.76%) Senior Software Engineer
10 14 (6.31%) Architect
10 14 (6.31%) Lead DevOps
10 14 (6.31%) Lead DevOps Engineer
10 14 (6.31%) Principal DevOps Engineer
11 13 (5.86%) Cloud Native Engineer
11 13 (5.86%) Senior DevOps
11 13 (5.86%) Senior DevOps Engineer
12 12 (5.41%) AWS Engineer
12 12 (5.41%) Senior Developer
13 11 (4.95%) Java Developer
14 9 (4.05%) Cloud Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 131 (59.01%) Terraform
2 62 (27.93%) Spring
3 59 (26.58%) Spring Boot
4 47 (21.17%) React
5 34 (15.32%) Kafka
6 21 (9.46%) Node.js
7 16 (7.21%) .NET
8 15 (6.76%) AngularJS
9 13 (5.86%) RESTful
9 13 (5.86%) Vue
10 12 (5.41%) REST
11 11 (4.95%) FastAPI
12 10 (4.50%) LangChain
13 9 (4.05%) RabbitMQ
14 8 (3.60%) CSS
15 7 (3.15%) CrewAI
15 7 (3.15%) HTML
15 7 (3.15%) LangGraph
16 6 (2.70%) OpenAPI
16 6 (2.70%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 70 (31.53%) Cloud Native
2 14 (6.31%) Distributed Systems
3 12 (5.41%) Media Streaming
3 12 (5.41%) Podcast
4 10 (4.50%) Greenfield Project
5 6 (2.70%) AI Agents
6 5 (2.25%) Hybrid Cloud
7 4 (1.80%) Security Posture
8 3 (1.35%) Cloud Security Posture
8 3 (1.35%) Life Science
8 3 (1.35%) Social Media
9 2 (0.90%) Cyber Defence
9 2 (0.90%) Cyber Threat
9 2 (0.90%) Hackathon
9 2 (0.90%) Legacy Systems
9 2 (0.90%) Onboarding
9 2 (0.90%) Product Ownership
9 2 (0.90%) Renewable Energy
10 1 (0.45%) Culture of Ownership
10 1 (0.45%) Online Gambling
Operating Systems
1 36 (16.22%) Linux
2 9 (4.05%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 8 (3.60%) CentOS
3 8 (3.60%) Windows
4 3 (1.35%) Ubuntu
5 2 (0.90%) Debian
5 2 (0.90%) Unix
6 1 (0.45%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 159 (71.62%) CI/CD
2 150 (67.57%) DevOps
3 112 (50.45%) Infrastructure as Code
4 102 (45.95%) Containerisation
5 92 (41.44%) Agile
6 61 (27.48%) AI
7 59 (26.58%) Mentoring
8 58 (26.13%) Software Engineering
9 57 (25.68%) Platform Engineering
10 53 (23.87%) Microservices
11 51 (22.97%) Observability
12 49 (22.07%) Continuous Improvement
13 47 (21.17%) Site Reliability Engineering
14 41 (18.47%) Problem-Solving
15 31 (13.96%) Event-Driven
16 27 (12.16%) Cloud Security
16 27 (12.16%) Technical Leadership
17 26 (11.71%) Scrum
18 23 (10.36%) Stakeholder Management
18 23 (10.36%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 95 (42.79%) Python
2 83 (37.39%) Java
3 43 (19.37%) TypeScript
4 41 (18.47%) Bash
5 29 (13.06%) JavaScript
6 24 (10.81%) SQL
7 22 (9.91%) PowerShell
8 18 (8.11%) Go
9 16 (7.21%) C#
10 10 (4.50%) Bicep
11 5 (2.25%) Kotlin
11 5 (2.25%) Rust
12 4 (1.80%) Scala
13 3 (1.35%) C++
13 3 (1.35%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 2 (0.90%) Shell Script
15 1 (0.45%) C
15 1 (0.45%) Objective-C
15 1 (0.45%) PL/SQL
15 1 (0.45%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 82 (36.94%) Security Cleared
2 53 (23.87%) DV Cleared
3 40 (18.02%) SC Cleared
4 12 (5.41%) AWS Certification
5 7 (3.15%) Azure Certification
5 7 (3.15%) Degree
6 3 (1.35%) Computer Science Degree
7 2 (0.90%) Microsoft Certification
7 2 (0.90%) Microsoft Certified Professional
8 1 (0.45%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
8 1 (0.45%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 1 (0.45%) BPSS Clearance
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (2.25%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 4 (1.80%) PCI DSS
3 3 (1.35%) Data Quality
3 3 (1.35%) QA
3 3 (1.35%) SOC 2
4 1 (0.45%) Accessibility
4 1 (0.45%) Cyber Essentials
System Software
1 137 (61.71%) Docker
2 6 (2.70%) VMware Infrastructure
3 4 (1.80%) Virtual Machines
3 4 (1.80%) VMware ESXi
3 4 (1.80%) VMware NSX
4 3 (1.35%) Ceph
5 2 (0.90%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 68 (30.63%) Ansible
2 17 (7.66%) Prometheus
3 16 (7.21%) Grafana
4 13 (5.86%) Argo
5 12 (5.41%) Puppet
6 11 (4.95%) Istio
6 11 (4.95%) Progress Chef
7 8 (3.60%) linkerd
8 4 (1.80%) Packer
8 4 (1.80%) vCenter Server
9 3 (1.35%) Check_MK
9 3 (1.35%) Podman
9 3 (1.35%) Single Sign-On
10 1 (0.45%) Opsview
Vendors
1 20 (9.01%) Microsoft
2 18 (8.11%) Google
3 8 (3.60%) OpenAI
4 7 (3.15%) VMware
5 6 (2.70%) Mistral
6 5 (2.25%) Databricks
6 5 (2.25%) Red Hat
7 4 (1.80%) HubSpot
7 4 (1.80%) YouTube
8 3 (1.35%) Dell
8 3 (1.35%) Dynatrace
8 3 (1.35%) Splunk
9 2 (0.90%) SaltStack
10 1 (0.45%) CrowdStrike
10 1 (0.45%) New Relic
10 1 (0.45%) Oracle
10 1 (0.45%) Percona