Apache Kafka
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs requiring Kafka skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 16 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 334 183 232
Rank change year-on-year -151 +49 -98
Permanent jobs citing Kafka 478 819 1,226
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.52% 1.87% 1.27%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 5.28% 9.35% 6.01%
Number of salaries quoted 322 421 702
10th Percentile £57,500 £53,250 £47,625
25th Percentile £70,313 £61,250 £56,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £95,000 £82,500 £75,000
Median % change year-on-year +15.15% +10.00% -15.24%
75th Percentile £134,375 £115,000 £100,000
90th Percentile £142,500 £138,750 £122,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £75,000 £70,000 £60,000
% change year-on-year +7.14% +16.67% -10.45%

All Software Libraries and Frameworks
UK

Kafka falls under the Software Libraries and Frameworks category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent job vacancies requiring technical specification, industry standards, software libraries and framework skills.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for technical specification, industry standards, software libraries and framework skills 9,053 8,763 20,384
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 9.91% 20.03% 21.12%
Number of salaries quoted 6,655 6,120 15,739
10th Percentile £40,000 £38,750 £36,250
25th Percentile £50,474 £50,750 £45,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £65,000 £65,000 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year - +8.33% -11.11%
75th Percentile £85,000 £87,500 £78,750
90th Percentile £100,000 £111,250 £100,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £60,000 £60,000 £55,000
% change year-on-year - +9.09% -4.35%

Kafka
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing Kafka relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised.

Kafka job vacancy trend in the UK

Kafka
Salary Trend

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Kafka.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Kafka

Kafka
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing Kafka over the 6 months to 16 May 2026.

Salary histogram for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
Top 16 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Kafka within the UK over the 6 months to 16 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
England -120 446 £95,000 +10.14% 216
London -8 329 £100,000 - 130
Work from Home -142 167 £100,000 +21.21% 226
UK excluding London -268 118 £75,000 +7.14% 113
North of England -149 44 £90,000 +24.14% 38
South East -60 40 £67,000 -7.59% 41
North West -98 30 £95,000 +33.81% 21
Midlands -82 12 £87,500 +27.27% 9
Yorkshire -61 11 £70,000 -9.68% 10
West Midlands -58 10 £87,500 +12.90% 7
East of England -25 9 £62,500 -19.35% 1
South West -63 8 £75,000 +11.11% 12
Scotland -71 7 £65,000 -7.14% 8
North East -44 3 - - 7
Wales - 3 £55,000 - 1
East Midlands -67 2 £120,000 +81.13% 2

Kafka
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities 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
1 102 (21.34%) Apache Spark
2 100 (20.92%) Apache Airflow
3 50 (10.46%) Apache
4 9 (1.88%) OpenStack
5 6 (1.26%) Confluence
6 3 (0.63%) Apache Pulsar
6 3 (0.63%) Apache Solr
7 2 (0.42%) Apache Qpid
7 2 (0.42%) BizTalk Server
7 2 (0.42%) Camunda
7 2 (0.42%) CICS
7 2 (0.42%) IIS
7 2 (0.42%) Palantir Foundry
7 2 (0.42%) Tomcat
8 1 (0.21%) Apache Synapse
8 1 (0.21%) GeoServer
8 1 (0.21%) nginx
8 1 (0.21%) NServiceBus
8 1 (0.21%) PegaRULES
8 1 (0.21%) SAS
Applications
1 2 (0.42%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 2 (0.42%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.21%) Actimize
2 1 (0.21%) Endur
Cloud Services
1 314 (65.69%) AWS
2 168 (35.15%) Azure
3 120 (25.10%) GCP
4 80 (16.74%) Serverless
5 61 (12.76%) dbt
6 59 (12.34%) AWS CloudFormation
7 56 (11.72%) Amazon S3
8 48 (10.04%) Snowflake
9 44 (9.21%) AWS Lambda
10 37 (7.74%) Datadog
11 35 (7.32%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 35 (7.32%) Power Platform
12 34 (7.11%) Amazon Kinesis
13 32 (6.69%) Amazon EKS
14 26 (5.44%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 26 (5.44%) Amazon SQS
15 23 (4.81%) GitHub
16 22 (4.60%) SaaS
17 20 (4.18%) Amazon EC2
17 20 (4.18%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 10 (2.09%) MQTT
2 7 (1.46%) Broadband
3 6 (1.26%) Network Security
4 3 (0.63%) HTTP
5 2 (0.42%) 4G
5 2 (0.42%) 5G
5 2 (0.42%) AMQP
5 2 (0.42%) Firewall
5 2 (0.42%) SSL
6 1 (0.21%) BGP
6 1 (0.21%) CTI
6 1 (0.21%) DNS
6 1 (0.21%) Ethernet VPN
6 1 (0.21%) LTE
6 1 (0.21%) Radio Access Network
6 1 (0.21%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 91 (19.04%) NoSQL
2 58 (12.13%) Data Warehouse
3 48 (10.04%) PostgreSQL
4 46 (9.62%) Data Lake
5 44 (9.21%) Elasticsearch
6 42 (8.79%) Amazon Redshift
7 40 (8.37%) Relational Database
8 38 (7.95%) MongoDB
9 37 (7.74%) Big Data
9 37 (7.74%) Tableau
10 36 (7.53%) BigQuery
11 35 (7.32%) Amazon RDS
12 33 (6.90%) Power BI
13 29 (6.07%) SQL Server
14 27 (5.65%) DynamoDB
14 27 (5.65%) Snowflake Schema
15 26 (5.44%) Looker
16 23 (4.81%) MySQL
17 22 (4.60%) Flink
17 22 (4.60%) Redis
Development Applications
1 63 (13.18%) Git
2 59 (12.34%) GitLab
3 57 (11.92%) Jenkins
4 27 (5.65%) MLflow
5 25 (5.23%) CircleCI
6 18 (3.77%) Cucumber
7 14 (2.93%) JIRA
8 9 (1.88%) JUnit
9 7 (1.46%) Selenium
10 5 (1.05%) Maven
10 5 (1.05%) SonarQube
11 4 (0.84%) IntelliJ
12 3 (0.63%) Bitbucket
12 3 (0.63%) Eclipse
12 3 (0.63%) REST Assured
12 3 (0.63%) Visual Studio
12 3 (0.63%) WinDbg
13 2 (0.42%) Mockito
13 2 (0.42%) Postman
13 2 (0.42%) TeamCity
General
1 190 (39.75%) Finance
2 104 (21.76%) Social Skills
3 54 (11.30%) Banking
4 52 (10.88%) Analytical Skills
4 52 (10.88%) Front Office
5 15 (3.14%) Telecoms
6 11 (2.30%) Law
7 9 (1.88%) Public Sector
7 9 (1.88%) Retail
8 8 (1.67%) Financial Institution
9 7 (1.46%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 7 (1.46%) Investment Banking
10 5 (1.05%) Billing
11 4 (0.84%) Advertising
12 3 (0.63%) Games
13 2 (0.42%) Back Office
13 2 (0.42%) Documentation Skills
13 2 (0.42%) Legal
13 2 (0.42%) Organisational Skills
14 1 (0.21%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 144 (30.13%) Developer
2 126 (26.36%) Senior
3 92 (19.25%) Data Engineer
4 76 (15.90%) Lead
5 58 (12.13%) Software Engineer
6 56 (11.72%) Java Engineer
7 46 (9.62%) Architect
8 37 (7.74%) Java Developer
9 34 (7.11%) AWS Engineer
10 33 (6.90%) Developer/Software Engineer
11 30 (6.28%) Senior Developer
12 29 (6.07%) Lead Developer
13 26 (5.44%) DevOps Engineer
14 25 (5.23%) Full-Stack Developer
14 25 (5.23%) Senior Systems Engineer
15 24 (5.02%) Principal Engineer
16 23 (4.81%) Lead Data Engineer
16 23 (4.81%) Python Engineer
16 23 (4.81%) Systems Engineer
17 21 (4.39%) Senior Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 90 (18.83%) Spring
2 84 (17.57%) Spring Boot
3 81 (16.95%) REST
4 77 (16.11%) React
5 72 (15.06%) RESTful
6 70 (14.64%) RabbitMQ
7 66 (13.81%) Node.js
8 38 (7.95%) gRPC
9 37 (7.74%) GraphQL
10 33 (6.90%) Redux
11 30 (6.28%) scikit-learn
12 29 (6.07%) PyTorch
13 28 (5.86%) .NET
14 26 (5.44%) AngularJS
14 26 (5.44%) PySpark
15 24 (5.02%) TensorFlow
16 23 (4.81%) LangChain
16 23 (4.81%) LlamaIndex
16 23 (4.81%) pgvector
17 22 (4.60%) Elastic Stack
Miscellaneous
1 130 (27.20%) Cloud Native
2 97 (20.29%) Distributed Systems
3 39 (8.16%) Fixed Income
4 38 (7.95%) Public Cloud
5 23 (4.81%) Clustering
6 19 (3.97%) Product Ownership
7 18 (3.77%) Blockchain
7 18 (3.77%) Web3
8 15 (3.14%) Data Structures
8 15 (3.14%) e-Learning
8 15 (3.14%) Onboarding
9 13 (2.72%) Legacy Systems
10 12 (2.51%) Distributed Architecture
10 12 (2.51%) Enterprise Software
11 10 (2.09%) Self-Motivation
12 9 (1.88%) AI Agents
12 9 (1.88%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 7 (1.46%) Distributed Computing
14 6 (1.26%) Anti-Piracy
14 6 (1.26%) Social Media
Operating Systems
1 25 (5.23%) Linux
2 8 (1.67%) Windows
3 6 (1.26%) Android
4 4 (0.84%) Unix
5 2 (0.42%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 2 (0.42%) Windows Server
5 2 (0.42%) Windows Server 2012
5 2 (0.42%) Windows Server 2016
5 2 (0.42%) Windows Server 2019
6 1 (0.21%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 228 (47.70%) CI/CD
2 193 (40.38%) Microservices
3 170 (35.56%) Agile
4 158 (33.05%) DevOps
5 144 (30.13%) Event-Driven
6 134 (28.03%) Software Engineering
7 123 (25.73%) AI
8 121 (25.31%) Analytics
9 117 (24.48%) Infrastructure as Code
10 114 (23.85%) Data Pipeline
11 110 (23.01%) Containerisation
12 104 (21.76%) Data Modelling
13 99 (20.71%) Data Engineering
14 98 (20.50%) Observability
15 86 (17.99%) Test Automation
16 82 (17.15%) ETL
17 79 (16.53%) Machine Learning
17 79 (16.53%) Mentoring
18 74 (15.48%) Event-Driven Architecture
19 69 (14.44%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 274 (57.32%) Python
2 201 (42.05%) Java
2 201 (42.05%) SQL
3 91 (19.04%) JavaScript
4 82 (17.15%) Go
5 71 (14.85%) TypeScript
6 37 (7.74%) C#
7 21 (4.39%) C++
7 21 (4.39%) Scala
8 20 (4.18%) Bash
9 19 (3.97%) Rust
10 8 (1.67%) T-SQL
11 7 (1.46%) PowerShell
12 6 (1.26%) Groovy
13 4 (0.84%) Bicep
13 4 (0.84%) Kotlin
14 3 (0.63%) PHP
14 3 (0.63%) PL/SQL
15 2 (0.42%) Apex Code
15 2 (0.42%) RPG
Qualifications
1 50 (10.46%) Degree
2 47 (9.83%) Security Cleared
3 33 (6.90%) Computer Science Degree
4 29 (6.07%) SC Cleared
5 19 (3.97%) AWS Certification
5 19 (3.97%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
6 13 (2.72%) DV Cleared
7 9 (1.88%) Azure Certification
8 3 (0.63%) Master's Degree
8 3 (0.63%) Microsoft Certification
9 1 (0.21%) CISSP
9 1 (0.21%) GIAC
9 1 (0.21%) ISTQB
9 1 (0.21%) SSCP
9 1 (0.21%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 63 (13.18%) Data Quality
2 33 (6.90%) GDPR
3 23 (4.81%) California Consumer Privacy Act
4 16 (3.35%) QA
5 10 (2.09%) PCI DSS
6 8 (1.67%) SOC 2
7 4 (0.84%) Accessibility
8 1 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
8 1 (0.21%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.21%) SLA
8 1 (0.21%) WCAG
System Software
1 163 (34.10%) Docker
2 8 (1.67%) Virtual Machines
3 2 (0.42%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.42%) VMware Infrastructure
4 1 (0.21%) Apache Flume
Systems Management
1 186 (38.91%) Kubernetes
2 133 (27.82%) Terraform
3 53 (11.09%) Prometheus
4 40 (8.37%) Ansible
5 38 (7.95%) Grafana
6 9 (1.88%) Istio
6 9 (1.88%) Puppet
7 8 (1.67%) Argo
8 6 (1.26%) Kibana
9 4 (0.84%) Podman
10 3 (0.63%) Packer
10 3 (0.63%) Progress Chef
11 2 (0.42%) Salt
12 1 (0.21%) Cilium
12 1 (0.21%) HP Fortify
12 1 (0.21%) logstash
12 1 (0.21%) QRadar
Vendors
1 60 (12.55%) Databricks
2 32 (6.69%) Microsoft
3 23 (4.81%) Cloudera
3 23 (4.81%) Dell
4 13 (2.72%) Confluent
5 10 (2.09%) Oracle
6 7 (1.46%) Solace
6 7 (1.46%) Splunk
6 7 (1.46%) Talend
7 6 (1.26%) Dynatrace
7 6 (1.26%) HubSpot
7 6 (1.26%) Pega
8 5 (1.05%) Google
8 5 (1.05%) MuleSoft
9 4 (0.84%) AppDynamics
9 4 (0.84%) NVIDIA
9 4 (0.84%) WSO2
10 3 (0.63%) OpenAI
10 3 (0.63%) ServiceNow
10 3 (0.63%) Tenable