Lead DevOps Job Trends

Lead Development Operations
UK

The median Lead Development Operations salary in the UK is £80,000 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 2 January 2026.

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

6 months to
2 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 556 609 562
Rank change year-on-year +53 -47 +233
Permanent jobs requiring a Lead DevOps 79 100 146
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.13% 0.18% 0.28%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.15% 0.20% 0.30%
Number of salaries quoted 72 57 127
10th Percentile £70,250 £66,500 £70,000
25th Percentile £77,500 £67,225 £76,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £80,000 £76,000 £85,000
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% -10.59% -5.56%
75th Percentile £92,500 £91,250 £95,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £107,750 £118,842
UK excluding London median annual salary £80,000 £72,500 £81,000
% change year-on-year +10.34% -10.49% +4.52%

All Permanent IT Job Roles
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 53,612 51,163 49,282
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 90.49% 93.12% 95.22%
Number of salaries quoted 32,999 26,912 38,093
10th Percentile £28,500 £33,200 £31,250
25th Percentile £36,250 £44,956 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £60,000 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% - -
75th Percentile £75,000 £78,750 £77,500
90th Percentile £93,750 £97,500 £97,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £52,500 £50,000
% change year-on-year -4.76% +5.00% -4.76%

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 2 January 2026.

Salary histogram for Lead DevOps in the UK

Lead DevOps
Top 13 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 2 January 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 +46 75 £80,000 +5.96% 11
UK excluding London +31 47 £80,000 +10.34% 8
Work from Home +77 33 £80,000 -5.88% 5
London +45 23 £95,000 -7.40% 3
North of England +13 17 £80,000 +17.65% 3
Midlands +31 13 £80,000 +18.72% 1
West Midlands +36 12 £80,000 +23.51% 1
Yorkshire -9 11 £80,000 +17.65%
South East +18 10 £75,000 -11.76% 2
South West +9 7 £80,000 +10.34% 2
North West +29 3 £85,000 -10.18% 3
North East +9 3 £95,000 -5.00%
East Midlands -16 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 2 January 2026, 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 44 (55.70%) CI/CD
3 38 (48.10%) Kubernetes
4 37 (46.84%) AWS
5 35 (44.30%) Infrastructure as Code
5 35 (44.30%) Terraform
6 33 (41.77%) Docker
7 32 (40.51%) Agile
7 32 (40.51%) Azure
8 23 (29.11%) Site Reliability Engineering
9 21 (26.58%) Ansible
10 20 (25.32%) Observability
11 19 (24.05%) GCP
12 18 (22.78%) Grafana
12 18 (22.78%) Prometheus
13 17 (21.52%) GitLab
13 17 (21.52%) Incident Response
13 17 (21.52%) Performance Optimisation
14 15 (18.99%) Infrastructure Engineering
14 15 (18.99%) Line Management
14 15 (18.99%) Security Cleared
15 14 (17.72%) Python
16 12 (15.19%) Containerisation
16 12 (15.19%) GitHub
17 11 (13.92%) Azure DevOps
17 11 (13.92%) GitHub Actions
18 10 (12.66%) Mentoring
19 9 (11.39%) DV Cleared
19 9 (11.39%) Go
20 8 (10.13%) Argo

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 32 (40.51%) Azure
3 19 (24.05%) 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 3 (3.80%) PaaS
7 3 (3.80%) Pulumi
8 2 (2.53%) AWS CloudFormation
8 2 (2.53%) Azure Monitor
8 2 (2.53%) SaaS
9 1 (1.27%) Amazon EC2
9 1 (1.27%) Amazon S3
9 1 (1.27%) AWS Lambda
9 1 (1.27%) Datadog
9 1 (1.27%) IaaS
9 1 (1.27%) Salesforce Commerce Cloud
9 1 (1.27%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 2 (2.53%) Broadband
2 1 (1.27%) DNS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (5.06%) Flink
2 2 (2.53%) NoSQL
2 2 (2.53%) RDBMS
2 2 (2.53%) Relational Database
3 1 (1.27%) Amazon RDS
3 1 (1.27%) Metadata
Development Applications
1 17 (21.52%) GitLab
2 4 (5.06%) Git
3 3 (3.80%) Jenkins
3 3 (3.80%) JIRA
3 3 (3.80%) Selenium
4 2 (2.53%) Jaeger
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%) WebDriver
General
1 15 (18.99%) Finance
2 8 (10.13%) Banking
3 6 (7.59%) Social Skills
4 5 (6.33%) Analytical Skills
5 4 (5.06%) Front Office
5 4 (5.06%) Investment Banking
6 3 (3.80%) Corporate Banking
6 3 (3.80%) Financial Institution
6 3 (3.80%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 3 (3.80%) Private Banking
7 2 (2.53%) Public Sector
8 1 (1.27%) Aviation
8 1 (1.27%) Documentation Skills
8 1 (1.27%) Law
8 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%) OpenTelemetry
3 2 (2.53%) .NET
3 2 (2.53%) Elastic Stack
3 2 (2.53%) Middleware
4 1 (1.27%) Lightning Web Components
4 1 (1.27%) REST
4 1 (1.27%) SOAP
4 1 (1.27%) Visualforce
Miscellaneous
1 16 (20.25%) Cloud Native
2 4 (5.06%) Product Ownership
3 2 (2.53%) Social Media
4 1 (1.27%) Analytical Mindset
4 1 (1.27%) Distributed Systems
4 1 (1.27%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 7 (8.86%) Linux
2 4 (5.06%) Windows
3 3 (3.80%) Unix
4 1 (1.27%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 79 (100.00%) DevOps
2 44 (55.70%) CI/CD
3 35 (44.30%) Infrastructure as Code
4 32 (40.51%) Agile
5 23 (29.11%) Site Reliability Engineering
6 20 (25.32%) Observability
7 17 (21.52%) Incident Response
7 17 (21.52%) Performance Optimisation
8 15 (18.99%) Infrastructure Engineering
8 15 (18.99%) Line Management
9 12 (15.19%) Containerisation
10 10 (12.66%) Mentoring
11 7 (8.86%) Continuous Improvement
11 7 (8.86%) Incident Management
12 6 (7.59%) DevSecOps
12 6 (7.59%) Problem-Solving
12 6 (7.59%) Roadmaps
12 6 (7.59%) Scrum
12 6 (7.59%) Test Automation
13 5 (6.33%) Deployment Automation
Programming Languages
1 14 (17.72%) Python
2 9 (11.39%) Go
3 8 (10.13%) Java
4 6 (7.59%) JavaScript
5 5 (6.33%) Bicep
6 4 (5.06%) Bash
7 3 (3.80%) SQL
8 2 (2.53%) C#
9 1 (1.27%) Apex Code
9 1 (1.27%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 15 (18.99%) Security Cleared
2 9 (11.39%) DV Cleared
3 6 (7.59%) SC Cleared
4 4 (5.06%) AWS Certification
5 3 (3.80%) Azure Certification
6 1 (1.27%) Computer Science Degree
6 1 (1.27%) Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (2.53%) QA
2 1 (1.27%) NIST
System Software
1 33 (41.77%) Docker
Systems Management
1 38 (48.10%) Kubernetes
2 35 (44.30%) Terraform
3 21 (26.58%) Ansible
4 18 (22.78%) Grafana
4 18 (22.78%) Prometheus
5 8 (10.13%) Argo
6 2 (2.53%) Kustomize
Vendors
1 2 (2.53%) Black Duck
1 2 (2.53%) Coverity
1 2 (2.53%) Google
2 1 (1.27%) Microsoft
2 1 (1.27%) Salesforce