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

6 months to
9 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 121 68 79
Rank change year-on-year -53 +11 -24
Permanent jobs citing Kubernetes 121 218 259
As % of all permanent jobs in the North West 1.17% 4.95% 2.77%
As % of the Systems Management category 26.54% 27.22% 39.48%
Number of salaries quoted 98 110 180
10th Percentile £57,125 £49,875 £47,375
25th Percentile £60,000 £62,500 £52,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £70,000 £78,810 £62,500
Median % change year-on-year -11.18% +26.10% -10.00%
75th Percentile £85,000 £93,778 £77,500
90th Percentile £95,750 £112,500 £85,000
England median annual salary £75,000 £83,230 £77,500
% change year-on-year -9.89% +7.39% -

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 456 801 656
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the North West 4.41% 18.20% 7.01%
Number of salaries quoted 346 267 526
10th Percentile £30,000 £34,000 £29,250
25th Percentile £40,000 £47,500 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £67,626 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year -11.28% +17.61% -0.54%
75th Percentile £75,938 £80,625 £71,250
90th Percentile £87,824 £95,000 £80,000
England median annual salary £65,000 £69,384 £60,500
% change year-on-year -6.32% +14.68% -10.37%

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 9 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 9 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 -36 97 £67,500 -15.63% 58
Merseyside -15 9 £95,000 - 4
Cumbria - 7 £85,000 - 1
Cheshire -53 4 £66,250 -14.52% 4
Lancashire -5 2 £69,038 +34.53% 14
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 (3.31%) Microsoft Exchange
2 3 (2.48%) Apache
2 3 (2.48%) Apache Spark
3 2 (1.65%) nginx
3 2 (1.65%) OpenStack
4 1 (0.83%) SharePoint
Applications
1 1 (0.83%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 81 (66.94%) AWS
2 54 (44.63%) Azure
3 29 (23.97%) Serverless
4 26 (21.49%) GCP
5 22 (18.18%) AWS CloudFormation
6 21 (17.36%) Azure AKS
7 19 (15.70%) GitHub
8 18 (14.88%) Amazon EKS
9 14 (11.57%) Amazon ECS
10 13 (10.74%) AWS Lambda
11 12 (9.92%) Datadog
12 11 (9.09%) GitHub Actions
13 7 (5.79%) Amazon EC2
13 7 (5.79%) Amazon SQS
13 7 (5.79%) Azure DevOps
13 7 (5.79%) Google Kubernetes Engine
14 6 (4.96%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 6 (4.96%) Amazon EventBridge
14 6 (4.96%) Amazon S3
14 6 (4.96%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 7 (5.79%) Internet
2 6 (4.96%) Firewall
3 3 (2.48%) AMQP
3 3 (2.48%) DNS
3 3 (2.48%) 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 25 (20.66%) NoSQL
2 24 (19.83%) PostgreSQL
3 20 (16.53%) MongoDB
4 9 (7.44%) DynamoDB
5 8 (6.61%) Amazon RDS
6 6 (4.96%) Elasticsearch
6 6 (4.96%) Relational Database
7 5 (4.13%) MySQL
7 5 (4.13%) SQL Server
8 3 (2.48%) Big Data
8 3 (2.48%) Cloudera CDH
8 3 (2.48%) Hadoop
8 3 (2.48%) Neo4j
9 2 (1.65%) BigQuery
9 2 (1.65%) Data Warehouse
9 2 (1.65%) PostHog
9 2 (1.65%) Redis
10 1 (0.83%) Azure SQL Database
10 1 (0.83%) DB2
Development Applications
1 19 (15.70%) Git
2 13 (10.74%) GitLab
3 11 (9.09%) Jenkins
4 3 (2.48%) Bitbucket
5 2 (1.65%) Vagrant
5 2 (1.65%) 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 15 (12.40%) Social Skills
2 5 (4.13%) Finance
3 4 (3.31%) Aerospace
3 4 (3.31%) Public Sector
4 3 (2.48%) Analytical Skills
5 2 (1.65%) Retail
6 1 (0.83%) Advertising
6 1 (0.83%) Banking
6 1 (0.83%) Investment Banking
Job Titles
1 39 (32.23%) Senior
2 33 (27.27%) Software Engineer
3 23 (19.01%) Developer
4 20 (16.53%) Lead
5 17 (14.05%) Cloud Engineer
6 15 (12.40%) DevOps Engineer
7 12 (9.92%) Java Developer
8 10 (8.26%) .NET Software Engineer
8 10 (8.26%) Senior Developer
9 9 (7.44%) Lead Software Engineer
9 9 (7.44%) Senior Software Engineer
10 8 (6.61%) Senior Java Developer
11 7 (5.79%) Lead Developer
11 7 (5.79%) Python Engineer
12 6 (4.96%) Azure Engineer
12 6 (4.96%) Integration Developer
12 6 (4.96%) Integration Engineer
12 6 (4.96%) Platform Engineer
12 6 (4.96%) Senior .NET Software Engineer
13 5 (4.13%) Java Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 24 (19.83%) Spring
2 22 (18.18%) Spring Boot
3 20 (16.53%) .NET
4 19 (15.70%) React
5 18 (14.88%) RESTful
6 15 (12.40%) Node.js
7 14 (11.57%) .NET Framework
8 10 (8.26%) FastAPI
9 8 (6.61%) AngularJS
9 8 (6.61%) Django
10 6 (4.96%) Kafka
10 6 (4.96%) OpenTelemetry
10 6 (4.96%) RabbitMQ
10 6 (4.96%) REST
10 6 (4.96%) Vue
11 4 (3.31%) ARM Templates
11 4 (3.31%) Hibernate
11 4 (3.31%) JWT
11 4 (3.31%) Next.js
11 4 (3.31%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 38 (31.40%) Cloud Native
2 24 (19.83%) Distributed Systems
3 6 (4.96%) Hybrid Cloud
4 5 (4.13%) Distributed Computing
5 4 (3.31%) Enterprise Cloud
5 4 (3.31%) Public Cloud
6 3 (2.48%) AI Agents
7 2 (1.65%) Legacy Systems
7 2 (1.65%) Mobile App
7 2 (1.65%) Product Ownership
7 2 (1.65%) Self-Motivation
8 1 (0.83%) Analytical Mindset
8 1 (0.83%) Cyber Threat
8 1 (0.83%) Cybercrime
8 1 (0.83%) Data Structures
8 1 (0.83%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 25 (20.66%) Linux
2 6 (4.96%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 5 (4.13%) Debian
3 5 (4.13%) Ubuntu
4 4 (3.31%) CentOS
5 3 (2.48%) Windows
6 1 (0.83%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 86 (71.07%) CI/CD
2 71 (58.68%) DevOps
3 66 (54.55%) Infrastructure as Code
4 62 (51.24%) Containerisation
5 51 (42.15%) Agile
6 41 (33.88%) Microservices
7 39 (32.23%) Software Engineering
8 29 (23.97%) Clean Code
8 29 (23.97%) Mentoring
9 27 (22.31%) Continuous Improvement
9 27 (22.31%) TDD
10 26 (21.49%) Scrum
11 25 (20.66%) Observability
12 24 (19.83%) Platform Engineering
13 21 (17.36%) Problem-Solving
14 20 (16.53%) Event-Driven
15 19 (15.70%) AI
16 16 (13.22%) Collaborative Culture
17 15 (12.40%) Event-Driven Architecture
18 14 (11.57%) Performance Tuning
Programming Languages
1 49 (40.50%) Python
2 33 (27.27%) Java
3 31 (25.62%) TypeScript
4 28 (23.14%) SQL
5 19 (15.70%) C#
6 16 (13.22%) JavaScript
7 14 (11.57%) Go
8 10 (8.26%) C
9 7 (5.79%) PowerShell
10 6 (4.96%) Bash
11 2 (1.65%) Bicep
12 1 (0.83%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 20 (16.53%) Security Cleared
2 12 (9.92%) SC Cleared
3 10 (8.26%) DV Cleared
4 5 (4.13%) Azure Certification
5 4 (3.31%) Degree
6 3 (2.48%) Computer Science Degree
7 2 (1.65%) AWS Certification
8 1 (0.83%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
8 1 (0.83%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (1.65%) QA
2 1 (0.83%) Data Quality
2 1 (0.83%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 67 (55.37%) Docker
2 4 (3.31%) Active Directory
2 4 (3.31%) Virtual Machines
2 4 (3.31%) VMware Infrastructure
3 3 (2.48%) VMware NSX
3 3 (2.48%) vSphere
4 1 (0.83%) Firmware
4 1 (0.83%) Hyper-V
4 1 (0.83%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 68 (56.20%) Terraform
2 33 (27.27%) Ansible
3 9 (7.44%) Grafana
4 6 (4.96%) Prometheus
5 4 (3.31%) Microsoft Intune
6 3 (2.48%) Puppet
6 3 (2.48%) Rancher
7 2 (1.65%) Nagios
7 2 (1.65%) Packer
7 2 (1.65%) Progress Chef
8 1 (0.83%) Argo
8 1 (0.83%) FortiGate
8 1 (0.83%) Istio
Vendors
1 7 (5.79%) Google
1 7 (5.79%) Microsoft
2 6 (4.96%) HubSpot
3 5 (4.13%) VMware
4 4 (3.31%) Red Hat
5 3 (2.48%) SaltStack
6 2 (1.65%) Databricks
6 2 (1.65%) OpenAI
6 2 (1.65%) Pega
6 2 (1.65%) WSO2
7 1 (0.83%) Dell
7 1 (0.83%) Fortinet
7 1 (0.83%) Oracle