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

6 months to
2 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 85 79 68
Rank change year-on-year -6 -11 -44
Permanent jobs citing Kubernetes 221 223 219
As % of all permanent jobs in the North West 1.70% 4.27% 2.90%
As % of the Systems Management category 42.18% 21.71% 42.69%
Number of salaries quoted 166 70 83
10th Percentile £47,500 £51,200 £42,500
25th Percentile £57,500 £57,500 £52,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £72,500 £66,250 £62,500
Median % change year-on-year +9.43% +6.00% -16.67%
75th Percentile £88,148 £79,375 £75,000
90th Percentile £96,875 £89,100 £87,500
England median annual salary £70,000 £77,500 £77,500
% change year-on-year -9.68% - +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 524 1,027 513
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the North West 4.04% 19.64% 6.80%
Number of salaries quoted 382 204 243
10th Percentile £33,000 £26,250 £31,250
25th Percentile £42,215 £33,125 £37,625
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £57,500 £48,720 £50,000
Median % change year-on-year +18.02% -2.56% -23.08%
75th Percentile £75,000 £67,500 £67,500
90th Percentile £90,000 £80,875 £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 2 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 2 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 -6 183 £73,750 +9.26% 218
Lancashire +8 15 £52,130 -13.83% 24
Merseyside -7 11 £95,000 +46.15% 5
Cheshire -49 10 £62,500 -7.41% 17
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 5 (2.26%) Apache Spark
2 4 (1.81%) Apache
3 3 (1.36%) OpenStack
4 2 (0.90%) Apache Airflow
4 2 (0.90%) Confluence
5 1 (0.45%) IIS
Applications
1 1 (0.45%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 141 (63.80%) AWS
2 77 (34.84%) Azure
3 49 (22.17%) GitHub
4 42 (19.00%) GCP
5 38 (17.19%) Serverless
6 31 (14.03%) AWS CloudFormation
7 21 (9.50%) GitHub Actions
7 21 (9.50%) OpenShift
8 20 (9.05%) AWS Lambda
9 13 (5.88%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 13 (5.88%) Amazon ECS
9 13 (5.88%) Datadog
10 12 (5.43%) Azure AKS
10 12 (5.43%) Azure DevOps
10 12 (5.43%) SaaS
11 11 (4.98%) GitHub Copilot
11 11 (4.98%) Google Kubernetes Engine
12 9 (4.07%) Amazon SQS
13 8 (3.62%) Amazon EKS
13 8 (3.62%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 4 (1.81%) Firewall
2 3 (1.36%) AMQP
2 3 (1.36%) DNS
2 3 (1.36%) Network Security
2 3 (1.36%) Software-Defined Networking
3 1 (0.45%) DHCP
3 1 (0.45%) HTTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 29 (13.12%) MongoDB
2 19 (8.60%) PostgreSQL
3 10 (4.52%) Amazon RDS
3 10 (4.52%) NoSQL
4 7 (3.17%) DynamoDB
5 6 (2.71%) Azure SQL Database
6 5 (2.26%) Chroma
6 5 (2.26%) Elasticsearch
6 5 (2.26%) Neo4j
6 5 (2.26%) Pinecone
7 4 (1.81%) Big Data
8 3 (1.36%) Cloudera CDH
8 3 (1.36%) Hadoop
9 2 (0.90%) Amazon Aurora
9 2 (0.90%) Redis
9 2 (0.90%) Relational Database
9 2 (0.90%) SQL Server
10 1 (0.45%) Amazon Redshift
10 1 (0.45%) Data Warehouse
10 1 (0.45%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 34 (15.38%) Git
2 32 (14.48%) GitLab
3 30 (13.57%) Jenkins
4 9 (4.07%) Atlassian Bamboo
5 6 (2.71%) JIRA
6 5 (2.26%) Cypress.io
7 4 (1.81%) Artifactory
7 4 (1.81%) Bitbucket
7 4 (1.81%) Cucumber
7 4 (1.81%) Robot Framework
7 4 (1.81%) Vagrant
7 4 (1.81%) Vite
8 3 (1.36%) Postman
8 3 (1.36%) Selenium
9 2 (0.90%) Mocha
10 1 (0.45%) Claude Code
10 1 (0.45%) Gemini Tracker
10 1 (0.45%) Maven
10 1 (0.45%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 34 (15.38%) Social Skills
2 17 (7.69%) Public Sector
3 12 (5.43%) Publishing
4 11 (4.98%) Finance
5 6 (2.71%) Advertising
5 6 (2.71%) Aerospace
5 6 (2.71%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 4 (1.81%) Analytical Skills
7 2 (0.90%) Manufacturing
7 2 (0.90%) Presentation Skills
8 1 (0.45%) Front Office
8 1 (0.45%) iGaming
8 1 (0.45%) Retail
Job Titles
1 69 (31.22%) DevOps Engineer
2 59 (26.70%) Senior
3 36 (16.29%) Developer
4 34 (15.38%) Software Engineer
5 31 (14.03%) Lead
6 29 (13.12%) Cloud Engineer
7 18 (8.14%) Principal Engineer
8 17 (7.69%) Platform Engineer
9 16 (7.24%) Senior Software Engineer
10 14 (6.33%) Architect
11 13 (5.88%) Senior DevOps
11 13 (5.88%) Senior DevOps Engineer
12 12 (5.43%) Cloud Native Engineer
12 12 (5.43%) Principal DevOps Engineer
12 12 (5.43%) Senior Developer
13 11 (4.98%) Java Developer
13 11 (4.98%) Lead DevOps
13 11 (4.98%) Lead DevOps Engineer
14 10 (4.52%) AWS Engineer
15 9 (4.07%) Lead Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 129 (58.37%) Terraform
2 60 (27.15%) Spring
3 56 (25.34%) Spring Boot
4 48 (21.72%) React
5 33 (14.93%) Kafka
6 23 (10.41%) Node.js
7 16 (7.24%) .NET
7 16 (7.24%) AngularJS
8 14 (6.33%) RESTful
8 14 (6.33%) Vue
9 13 (5.88%) FastAPI
10 11 (4.98%) REST
11 10 (4.52%) LangChain
11 10 (4.52%) RabbitMQ
12 8 (3.62%) OpenTelemetry
13 7 (3.17%) CrewAI
13 7 (3.17%) CSS
13 7 (3.17%) LangGraph
13 7 (3.17%) OpenAPI
13 7 (3.17%) Swagger
Miscellaneous
1 74 (33.48%) Cloud Native
2 19 (8.60%) Distributed Systems
3 12 (5.43%) Media Streaming
3 12 (5.43%) Podcast
4 10 (4.52%) Greenfield Project
5 7 (3.17%) AI Agents
6 6 (2.71%) Hybrid Cloud
7 4 (1.81%) Security Posture
8 3 (1.36%) Cloud Security Posture
8 3 (1.36%) Life Science
8 3 (1.36%) Product Ownership
8 3 (1.36%) Social Media
9 2 (0.90%) Legacy Systems
9 2 (0.90%) Onboarding
9 2 (0.90%) Renewable Energy
10 1 (0.45%) Culture of Ownership
10 1 (0.45%) Cyber Defence
10 1 (0.45%) Cyber Threat
10 1 (0.45%) Data Centre
10 1 (0.45%) Enterprise Cloud
Operating Systems
1 35 (15.84%) Linux
2 11 (4.98%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 8 (3.62%) CentOS
4 6 (2.71%) Windows
5 4 (1.81%) Ubuntu
6 3 (1.36%) Debian
7 2 (0.90%) Unix
8 1 (0.45%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 159 (71.95%) CI/CD
2 144 (65.16%) DevOps
3 112 (50.68%) Infrastructure as Code
4 104 (47.06%) Containerisation
5 89 (40.27%) Agile
6 65 (29.41%) AI
7 62 (28.05%) Software Engineering
8 61 (27.60%) Observability
9 59 (26.70%) Mentoring
10 55 (24.89%) Microservices
11 53 (23.98%) Platform Engineering
12 49 (22.17%) Continuous Improvement
13 48 (21.72%) Site Reliability Engineering
14 43 (19.46%) Problem-Solving
15 33 (14.93%) Event-Driven
16 27 (12.22%) Cloud Security
17 25 (11.31%) Scrum
18 23 (10.41%) Code Quality
19 22 (9.95%) Infrastructure Engineering
19 22 (9.95%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 94 (42.53%) Python
2 77 (34.84%) Java
3 45 (20.36%) TypeScript
4 40 (18.10%) Bash
5 29 (13.12%) JavaScript
6 24 (10.86%) PowerShell
7 21 (9.50%) SQL
8 17 (7.69%) Go
9 16 (7.24%) C#
10 11 (4.98%) Bicep
11 5 (2.26%) Rust
12 4 (1.81%) Kotlin
12 4 (1.81%) Scala
13 3 (1.36%) C++
14 2 (0.90%) Shell Script
15 1 (0.45%) C
15 1 (0.45%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 1 (0.45%) Objective-C
15 1 (0.45%) PL/SQL
15 1 (0.45%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 73 (33.03%) Security Cleared
2 46 (20.81%) DV Cleared
3 37 (16.74%) SC Cleared
4 9 (4.07%) AWS Certification
5 7 (3.17%) Azure Certification
5 7 (3.17%) Degree
6 4 (1.81%) 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
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (2.26%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 4 (1.81%) PCI DSS
3 3 (1.36%) QA
3 3 (1.36%) SOC 2
4 1 (0.45%) Accessibility
4 1 (0.45%) Cyber Essentials
4 1 (0.45%) Data Quality
System Software
1 136 (61.54%) Docker
2 5 (2.26%) Virtual Machines
3 4 (1.81%) VMware Infrastructure
4 3 (1.36%) Active Directory
4 3 (1.36%) Ceph
5 2 (0.90%) VMware ESXi
5 2 (0.90%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 61 (27.60%) Ansible
2 21 (9.50%) Prometheus
3 20 (9.05%) Grafana
4 13 (5.88%) Argo
5 11 (4.98%) Istio
5 11 (4.98%) Progress Chef
5 11 (4.98%) Puppet
6 8 (3.62%) linkerd
7 4 (1.81%) Packer
8 3 (1.36%) Check_MK
8 3 (1.36%) Podman
8 3 (1.36%) Single Sign-On
9 2 (0.90%) vCenter Server
10 1 (0.45%) Opsview
Vendors
1 18 (8.14%) Google
1 18 (8.14%) Microsoft
2 8 (3.62%) OpenAI
3 6 (2.71%) HubSpot
3 6 (2.71%) Mistral
3 6 (2.71%) Red Hat
4 5 (2.26%) VMware
5 4 (1.81%) YouTube
6 3 (1.36%) Databricks
6 3 (1.36%) Dell
6 3 (1.36%) Dynatrace
6 3 (1.36%) SaltStack
6 3 (1.36%) Splunk
7 1 (0.45%) CrowdStrike
7 1 (0.45%) New Relic
7 1 (0.45%) Oracle
7 1 (0.45%) Percona