Lead DevOps Job Trends

Lead Development Operations
UK

The median Lead Development Operations salary in the UK is £85,000 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 14 December 2025.

The table below compares current salary benchmarking and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 567 617 550
Rank change year-on-year +50 -67 +263
Permanent jobs requiring a Lead DevOps 79 99 145
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.14% 0.17% 0.29%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.15% 0.18% 0.31%
Number of salaries quoted 68 58 124
10th Percentile £71,750 - £70,000
25th Percentile £77,500 £66,500 £75,938
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £85,000 £75,500 £85,000
Median % change year-on-year +12.58% -11.18% -8.11%
75th Percentile £95,000 £91,250 £95,385
90th Percentile £106,000 £110,556 £120,046
UK excluding London median annual salary £80,000 £72,500 £80,000
% change year-on-year +10.34% -9.38% +2.56%

All Permanent IT Job Vacancies
UK

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent IT job vacancies. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of permanent jobs in our overall sample.

Permanent vacancies in the UK with a recognized job title 52,344 54,757 47,045
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 90.08% 93.89% 95.24%
Number of salaries quoted 32,163 29,820 36,466
10th Percentile £28,500 £32,725 £31,250
25th Percentile £36,250 £43,750 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £59,430 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year -7.45% -0.95% -
75th Percentile £75,000 £77,500 £80,000
90th Percentile £92,500 £96,250 £97,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £48,500 £52,500 £52,500
% change year-on-year -7.62% - -

Lead DevOps
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings featuring 'Lead DevOps' in the job title relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised.

Lead DevOps job vacancy trend in the UK

Lead DevOps
Salary Trend

Salary distribution trend for Lead DevOps job vacancies in the UK.

Salary distribution trend for Lead DevOps job vacancies in the UK

Lead DevOps
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing Lead DevOps over the 6 months to 14 December 2025.

Salary histogram for Lead DevOps in the UK

Lead DevOps
Top 12 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Lead DevOps within the UK over the 6 months to 14 December 2025. 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 +73 75 £85,000 +13.33% 21
UK excluding London +45 50 £80,000 +10.34% 11
Work from Home +87 29 £80,000 -5.88% 17
London +68 21 £95,000 -7.49% 12
North of England +20 19 £80,000 +17.65% 1
West Midlands +41 14 £82,500 +27.36% 2
Midlands +38 14 £82,500 +26.92% 3
South East +35 12 £83,500 -1.76% 6
Yorkshire -8 10 £80,000 +17.65%
North East +7 6 £95,000 -5.00%
South West +4 5 £80,000 +10.34% 1
North West +31 3 £85,000 -10.18% 1

Lead DevOps Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities

For the 6 months to 14 December 2025, Lead DevOps job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all permanent job ads featuring Lead DevOps in the job title.

1 79 (100.00%) DevOps
2 41 (51.90%) CI/CD
3 37 (46.84%) AWS
4 35 (44.30%) Kubernetes
5 33 (41.77%) Infrastructure as Code
6 32 (40.51%) Terraform
7 29 (36.71%) Azure
8 27 (34.18%) Docker
9 26 (32.91%) Agile
10 19 (24.05%) Security Cleared
10 19 (24.05%) Site Reliability Engineering
11 16 (20.25%) Ansible
11 16 (20.25%) Observability
12 15 (18.99%) GCP
13 14 (17.72%) Grafana
14 13 (16.46%) Incident Response
14 13 (16.46%) Prometheus
15 12 (15.19%) GitHub
15 12 (15.19%) GitLab
15 12 (15.19%) Performance Optimisation
15 12 (15.19%) Python
16 11 (13.92%) Azure DevOps
16 11 (13.92%) Containerisation
16 11 (13.92%) GitHub Actions
16 11 (13.92%) Infrastructure Engineering
16 11 (13.92%) Line Management
17 10 (12.66%) DV Cleared
17 10 (12.66%) SC Cleared
18 9 (11.39%) Linux
18 9 (11.39%) Mentoring

Lead DevOps Skill Set
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 2 (2.53%) Confluence
2 1 (1.27%) WebLogic
Cloud Services
1 37 (46.84%) AWS
2 29 (36.71%) Azure
3 15 (18.99%) GCP
4 12 (15.19%) GitHub
5 11 (13.92%) Azure DevOps
5 11 (13.92%) GitHub Actions
6 4 (5.06%) Amazon EKS
6 4 (5.06%) Amazon Kinesis
7 2 (2.53%) Amazon S3
7 2 (2.53%) AWS CloudFormation
7 2 (2.53%) Azure Monitor
7 2 (2.53%) PaaS
7 2 (2.53%) Pulumi
7 2 (2.53%) SaaS
8 1 (1.27%) Amazon ECS
8 1 (1.27%) Azure AKS
8 1 (1.27%) Cloudflare
8 1 (1.27%) Salesforce Service Cloud
8 1 (1.27%) Serverless
8 1 (1.27%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 1 (1.27%) Broadband
1 1 (1.27%) DNS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (5.06%) Flink
2 1 (1.27%) Amazon RDS
2 1 (1.27%) Metadata
2 1 (1.27%) NoSQL
2 1 (1.27%) RDBMS
2 1 (1.27%) Relational Database
Development Applications
1 12 (15.19%) GitLab
2 4 (5.06%) Git
2 4 (5.06%) Jenkins
3 3 (3.80%) JIRA
3 3 (3.80%) Selenium
4 2 (2.53%) Robot Framework
4 2 (2.53%) Snyk
5 1 (1.27%) Bitbucket
5 1 (1.27%) CircleCI
5 1 (1.27%) Jaeger
5 1 (1.27%) WebDriver
General
1 15 (18.99%) Finance
2 8 (10.13%) Banking
3 5 (6.33%) Analytical Skills
3 5 (6.33%) Social Skills
4 4 (5.06%) Front Office
4 4 (5.06%) Investment Banking
5 3 (3.80%) Corporate Banking
5 3 (3.80%) Financial Institution
5 3 (3.80%) Private Banking
6 2 (2.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 2 (2.53%) Public Sector
7 1 (1.27%) Aviation
7 1 (1.27%) Documentation Skills
7 1 (1.27%) Law
7 1 (1.27%) Organisational Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 4 (5.06%) ARM Templates
1 4 (5.06%) Kafka
1 4 (5.06%) React
2 3 (3.80%) .NET
3 2 (2.53%) Middleware
3 2 (2.53%) OpenTelemetry
4 1 (1.27%) Elastic Stack
4 1 (1.27%) LAMP
4 1 (1.27%) Lightning Web Components
4 1 (1.27%) REST
4 1 (1.27%) SOAP
4 1 (1.27%) Visualforce
4 1 (1.27%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 12 (15.19%) Cloud Native
2 3 (3.80%) Product Ownership
3 1 (1.27%) Analytical Mindset
3 1 (1.27%) Data Centre
3 1 (1.27%) Distributed Systems
3 1 (1.27%) Greenfield Project
3 1 (1.27%) Social Media
Operating Systems
1 9 (11.39%) Linux
2 7 (8.86%) Windows
3 2 (2.53%) Unix
4 1 (1.27%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 79 (100.00%) DevOps
2 41 (51.90%) CI/CD
3 33 (41.77%) Infrastructure as Code
4 26 (32.91%) Agile
5 19 (24.05%) Site Reliability Engineering
6 16 (20.25%) Observability
7 13 (16.46%) Incident Response
8 12 (15.19%) Performance Optimisation
9 11 (13.92%) Containerisation
9 11 (13.92%) Infrastructure Engineering
9 11 (13.92%) Line Management
10 9 (11.39%) Mentoring
11 7 (8.86%) Continuous Improvement
11 7 (8.86%) Incident Management
12 6 (7.59%) Microservices
12 6 (7.59%) Problem-Solving
12 6 (7.59%) Scrum
12 6 (7.59%) Test Automation
13 5 (6.33%) Deployment Automation
13 5 (6.33%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 12 (15.19%) Python
2 7 (8.86%) Go
2 7 (8.86%) Java
3 5 (6.33%) Bicep
4 4 (5.06%) JavaScript
5 3 (3.80%) Bash
5 3 (3.80%) SQL
6 2 (2.53%) C#
7 1 (1.27%) Apex Code
7 1 (1.27%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 19 (24.05%) Security Cleared
2 10 (12.66%) DV Cleared
2 10 (12.66%) SC Cleared
3 2 (2.53%) AWS Certification
3 2 (2.53%) Azure Certification
4 1 (1.27%) Computer Science Degree
4 1 (1.27%) Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (2.53%) QA
System Software
1 27 (34.18%) Docker
Systems Management
1 35 (44.30%) Kubernetes
2 32 (40.51%) Terraform
3 16 (20.25%) Ansible
4 14 (17.72%) Grafana
5 13 (16.46%) Prometheus
6 6 (7.59%) Argo
7 1 (1.27%) Kustomize
Vendors
1 2 (2.53%) Black Duck
1 2 (2.53%) Coverity
2 1 (1.27%) Google
2 1 (1.27%) Microsoft
2 1 (1.27%) Salesforce
2 1 (1.27%) VMware