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

6 months to
18 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 122 76 79
Rank change year-on-year -46 +3 -22
Permanent jobs citing Kubernetes 120 251 262
As % of all permanent jobs in the North West 1.14% 5.35% 2.76%
As % of the Systems Management category 25.64% 23.01% 39.52%
Number of salaries quoted 98 108 182
10th Percentile £54,100 £48,375 £46,375
25th Percentile £60,000 £62,500 £52,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £70,750 £78,155 £62,500
Median % change year-on-year -9.47% +25.05% -10.00%
75th Percentile £85,000 £93,778 £77,500
90th Percentile £95,000 £112,500 £85,000
England median annual salary £75,000 £82,500 £77,500
% change year-on-year -9.09% +6.45% -

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 468 1,091 663
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the North West 4.43% 23.25% 6.98%
Number of salaries quoted 357 272 530
10th Percentile £30,300 £32,500 £29,225
25th Percentile £37,500 £46,125 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £67,500 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year -11.11% +17.39% -4.17%
75th Percentile £75,000 £80,000 £71,250
90th Percentile £87,500 £93,778 £80,000
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 18 May 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 May 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 -40 95 £67,500 -15.63% 66
Merseyside -11 9 £95,000 - 3
Cumbria - 7 £85,000 -
Cheshire -54 4 £66,250 -14.52% 4
Lancashire +1 3 £65,576 +27.79% 18
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 (2.50%) Apache
1 3 (2.50%) Apache Spark
1 3 (2.50%) Microsoft Exchange
2 2 (1.67%) nginx
2 2 (1.67%) OpenStack
3 1 (0.83%) SharePoint
Applications
1 1 (0.83%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 83 (69.17%) AWS
2 57 (47.50%) Azure
3 30 (25.00%) Serverless
4 27 (22.50%) GCP
5 22 (18.33%) AWS CloudFormation
5 22 (18.33%) GitHub
6 20 (16.67%) Azure AKS
7 18 (15.00%) Amazon EKS
8 14 (11.67%) Amazon ECS
9 13 (10.83%) AWS Lambda
10 12 (10.00%) Datadog
11 11 (9.17%) GitHub Actions
12 7 (5.83%) Amazon EC2
12 7 (5.83%) Amazon SQS
12 7 (5.83%) Azure DevOps
12 7 (5.83%) Google Kubernetes Engine
13 6 (5.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 6 (5.00%) Amazon S3
13 6 (5.00%) Entra ID
13 6 (5.00%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 7 (5.83%) Internet
2 6 (5.00%) Firewall
3 3 (2.50%) AMQP
3 3 (2.50%) DNS
3 3 (2.50%) TCP/IP
4 1 (0.83%) DHCP
4 1 (0.83%) Network Security
4 1 (0.83%) SD-WAN
4 1 (0.83%) VLAN
4 1 (0.83%) VPN
4 1 (0.83%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 22 (18.33%) PostgreSQL
2 21 (17.50%) MongoDB
2 21 (17.50%) NoSQL
3 9 (7.50%) DynamoDB
4 8 (6.67%) Amazon RDS
5 6 (5.00%) Elasticsearch
5 6 (5.00%) Relational Database
6 5 (4.17%) SQL Server
7 4 (3.33%) MySQL
8 3 (2.50%) Big Data
8 3 (2.50%) Cloudera CDH
8 3 (2.50%) Hadoop
8 3 (2.50%) Neo4j
9 2 (1.67%) Azure SQL Database
9 2 (1.67%) BigQuery
9 2 (1.67%) PostHog
9 2 (1.67%) Redis
10 1 (0.83%) Data Warehouse
10 1 (0.83%) DB2
Development Applications
1 19 (15.83%) Git
2 13 (10.83%) GitLab
3 11 (9.17%) Jenkins
4 3 (2.50%) Bitbucket
5 2 (1.67%) Vagrant
5 2 (1.67%) Vite
6 1 (0.83%) Claude Code
6 1 (0.83%) IntelliJ
6 1 (0.83%) JIRA
6 1 (0.83%) JUnit
6 1 (0.83%) TeamCity
General
1 13 (10.83%) Social Skills
2 5 (4.17%) Finance
2 5 (4.17%) Public Sector
3 4 (3.33%) Aerospace
4 3 (2.50%) Analytical Skills
5 2 (1.67%) Advertising
5 2 (1.67%) Retail
6 1 (0.83%) Banking
6 1 (0.83%) Investment Banking
Job Titles
1 40 (33.33%) Senior
2 30 (25.00%) Software Engineer
3 24 (20.00%) Developer
4 19 (15.83%) Cloud Engineer
5 17 (14.17%) Lead
6 15 (12.50%) DevOps Engineer
7 13 (10.83%) Java Developer
8 10 (8.33%) Senior Developer
9 9 (7.50%) .NET Software Engineer
9 9 (7.50%) Senior Java Developer
10 8 (6.67%) Lead Software Engineer
10 8 (6.67%) Senior Software Engineer
11 7 (5.83%) Lead Developer
11 7 (5.83%) Platform Engineer
11 7 (5.83%) Python Engineer
12 6 (5.00%) Azure Engineer
12 6 (5.00%) Integration Developer
12 6 (5.00%) Java Software Developer
12 6 (5.00%) Senior Java Software Developer
12 6 (5.00%) Software Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 25 (20.83%) Spring
2 23 (19.17%) Spring Boot
3 19 (15.83%) React
4 17 (14.17%) .NET
4 17 (14.17%) RESTful
5 15 (12.50%) Node.js
6 12 (10.00%) .NET Framework
7 10 (8.33%) FastAPI
8 8 (6.67%) AngularJS
8 8 (6.67%) Django
9 6 (5.00%) Kafka
9 6 (5.00%) OpenTelemetry
9 6 (5.00%) RabbitMQ
9 6 (5.00%) REST
9 6 (5.00%) Vue
10 5 (4.17%) JWT
10 5 (4.17%) OAuth
11 4 (3.33%) Hibernate
11 4 (3.33%) Next.js
11 4 (3.33%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 34 (28.33%) Cloud Native
2 20 (16.67%) Distributed Systems
3 6 (5.00%) Hybrid Cloud
4 4 (3.33%) Enterprise Cloud
4 4 (3.33%) Public Cloud
5 3 (2.50%) AI Agents
6 2 (1.67%) Distributed Computing
6 2 (1.67%) Legacy Systems
6 2 (1.67%) Mobile App
6 2 (1.67%) Product Ownership
6 2 (1.67%) Self-Motivation
7 1 (0.83%) Analytical Mindset
7 1 (0.83%) Data Structures
7 1 (0.83%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 25 (20.83%) Linux
2 6 (5.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 5 (4.17%) Debian
3 5 (4.17%) Ubuntu
4 4 (3.33%) CentOS
5 3 (2.50%) Windows
6 1 (0.83%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 84 (70.00%) CI/CD
2 73 (60.83%) DevOps
3 69 (57.50%) Infrastructure as Code
4 59 (49.17%) Containerisation
5 53 (44.17%) Agile
6 37 (30.83%) Microservices
7 36 (30.00%) Software Engineering
8 28 (23.33%) Continuous Improvement
8 28 (23.33%) Mentoring
9 26 (21.67%) Clean Code
9 26 (21.67%) Platform Engineering
9 26 (21.67%) Scrum
10 25 (20.83%) TDD
11 24 (20.00%) Observability
12 22 (18.33%) AI
13 21 (17.50%) Problem-Solving
14 18 (15.00%) Collaborative Culture
15 17 (14.17%) Event-Driven
16 13 (10.83%) Test Automation
17 12 (10.00%) Event-Driven Architecture
Programming Languages
1 49 (40.83%) Python
2 34 (28.33%) Java
3 28 (23.33%) TypeScript
4 24 (20.00%) SQL
5 16 (13.33%) C#
6 15 (12.50%) JavaScript
7 13 (10.83%) Go
8 10 (8.33%) C
9 7 (5.83%) PowerShell
10 6 (5.00%) Bash
11 2 (1.67%) Bicep
12 1 (0.83%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 22 (18.33%) Security Cleared
2 14 (11.67%) SC Cleared
3 10 (8.33%) DV Cleared
4 6 (5.00%) Azure Certification
5 4 (3.33%) Degree
6 3 (2.50%) AWS Certification
6 3 (2.50%) Computer Science Degree
7 1 (0.83%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
7 1 (0.83%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (1.67%) QA
2 1 (0.83%) Data Quality
2 1 (0.83%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 66 (55.00%) Docker
2 4 (3.33%) Virtual Machines
3 3 (2.50%) Active Directory
3 3 (2.50%) VMware Infrastructure
3 3 (2.50%) VMware NSX
3 3 (2.50%) vSphere
4 1 (0.83%) Firmware
4 1 (0.83%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 72 (60.00%) Terraform
2 35 (29.17%) Ansible
3 9 (7.50%) Grafana
4 6 (5.00%) Prometheus
5 3 (2.50%) Microsoft Intune
5 3 (2.50%) Puppet
5 3 (2.50%) Rancher
6 2 (1.67%) Nagios
6 2 (1.67%) Packer
6 2 (1.67%) Progress Chef
7 1 (0.83%) Argo
7 1 (0.83%) FortiGate
7 1 (0.83%) Istio
Vendors
1 7 (5.83%) Google
1 7 (5.83%) Microsoft
2 6 (5.00%) HubSpot
3 4 (3.33%) Red Hat
3 4 (3.33%) VMware
4 3 (2.50%) SaltStack
5 2 (1.67%) Databricks
5 2 (1.67%) OpenAI
5 2 (1.67%) Pega
5 2 (1.67%) WSO2
6 1 (0.83%) Fortinet
6 1 (0.83%) Oracle