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 19 September 2025.

The table below provides salary benchmarking and summary statistics, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 623 660 606
Rank change year-on-year +37 -54 +178
Permanent jobs requiring a Lead DevOps 51 131 177
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 0.10% 0.17% 0.29%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.12% 0.18% 0.31%
Number of salaries quoted 34 86 153
10th Percentile £68,300 - £70,000
25th Percentile £77,500 £66,500 £77,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £85,000 £80,000 £87,500
Median % change year-on-year +6.25% -8.57% -5.41%
75th Percentile £95,000 £90,000 £93,750
90th Percentile £100,000 £107,500 £112,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £85,000 £70,000 £85,000
% change year-on-year +21.43% -17.65% +6.25%

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 44,309 74,419 56,988
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 89.65% 95.24% 94.21%
Number of salaries quoted 26,050 44,613 44,179
10th Percentile £28,250 £30,000 £32,500
25th Percentile £36,250 £40,000 £43,750
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £55,000 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year - -8.33% -
75th Percentile £75,000 £73,750 £80,000
90th Percentile £95,000 £92,500 £97,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £47,500 £50,000 £52,500
% change year-on-year -5.00% -4.76% -

Lead DevOps
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings that featured Lead DevOps in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Lead DevOps 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 19 September 2025.

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 19 September 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 +33 48 £85,000 +6.25% 23
UK excluding London +60 29 £85,000 +21.43% 13
London +41 19 £92,500 +1.37% 12
Work from Home +53 17 £82,500 -2.94% 10
North of England +8 16 £80,000 +17.65% 1
Yorkshire -8 11 £74,000 +8.82% 1
West Midlands +50 5 £100,000 +29.03%
Midlands +47 5 £100,000 +35.59% 2
South East +32 5 £85,000 -2.86% 6
North East +21 3 - -
Scotland +44 2 £80,000 - 1
North West +4 2 £87,500 -
South West +69 1 £92,500 +21.71% 3

Lead DevOps Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities

For the 6 months to 19 September 2025, Lead DevOps job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number co-occurrences and as a proportion of all permanent job ads featuring Lead DevOps in the job title.

1 51 (100.00%) DevOps
2 32 (62.75%) AWS
3 31 (60.78%) CI/CD
4 25 (49.02%) Kubernetes
5 24 (47.06%) Terraform
6 23 (45.10%) Azure
7 19 (37.25%) Infrastructure as Code
8 18 (35.29%) Docker
8 18 (35.29%) Agile
9 16 (31.37%) Cloud Native
10 13 (25.49%) Ansible
10 13 (25.49%) GCP
11 12 (23.53%) Artificial Intelligence
11 12 (23.53%) Python
12 11 (21.57%) Finance
12 11 (21.57%) Security Cleared
13 10 (19.61%) SDLC
13 10 (19.61%) Grafana
13 10 (19.61%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 10 (19.61%) Observability
14 9 (17.65%) Site Reliability Engineering
14 9 (17.65%) Containerisation
14 9 (17.65%) SC Cleared
14 9 (17.65%) Law
14 9 (17.65%) Linux
15 8 (15.69%) Windows
15 8 (15.69%) Software Engineering
15 8 (15.69%) Banking
15 8 (15.69%) Machine Learning
15 8 (15.69%) GitLab

Lead DevOps Skill Set
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 2 (3.92%) nginx
2 1 (1.96%) Apache
2 1 (1.96%) Apache Solr
2 1 (1.96%) Drupal
Cloud Services
1 32 (62.75%) AWS
2 23 (45.10%) Azure
3 13 (25.49%) GCP
4 6 (11.76%) Azure DevOps
5 5 (9.80%) GitHub
5 5 (9.80%) GitHub Actions
6 4 (7.84%) Amazon ECS
6 4 (7.84%) Amazon EKS
6 4 (7.84%) Apigee
6 4 (7.84%) Kong
7 2 (3.92%) AWS CloudFormation
7 2 (3.92%) Pulumi
8 1 (1.96%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 1 (1.96%) Amazon GuardDuty
8 1 (1.96%) Amazon S3
8 1 (1.96%) AWS Control Tower
8 1 (1.96%) Azure AKS
8 1 (1.96%) Cloudflare
8 1 (1.96%) Datadog
Communications & Networking
1 5 (9.80%) Firewall
2 3 (5.88%) Network Security
3 2 (3.92%) DNS
4 1 (1.96%) HTTPS
4 1 (1.96%) IPsec
4 1 (1.96%) SSH
4 1 (1.96%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (7.84%) KDB
2 1 (1.96%) Couchbase
2 1 (1.96%) MySQL
2 1 (1.96%) NoSQL
Development Applications
1 8 (15.69%) GitLab
2 4 (7.84%) Jenkins
3 1 (1.96%) CircleCI
3 1 (1.96%) Git
3 1 (1.96%) Jaeger
3 1 (1.96%) TeamCity
General
1 11 (21.57%) Finance
2 10 (19.61%) Inclusion and Diversity
3 9 (17.65%) Law
4 8 (15.69%) Banking
5 7 (13.73%) Social Skills
6 1 (1.96%) Aviation
6 1 (1.96%) Marketing
6 1 (1.96%) Organisational Skills
6 1 (1.96%) Public Sector
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 4 (7.84%) OpenAPI
1 4 (7.84%) RESTful
1 4 (7.84%) Swagger
2 2 (3.92%) Middleware
3 1 (1.96%) .NET
3 1 (1.96%) Elastic Stack
3 1 (1.96%) LAMP
3 1 (1.96%) Laravel
3 1 (1.96%) Loki
3 1 (1.96%) Next.js
3 1 (1.96%) OpenTelemetry
3 1 (1.96%) RabbitMQ
3 1 (1.96%) Spring
3 1 (1.96%) Spring Boot
3 1 (1.96%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 16 (31.37%) Cloud Native
2 5 (9.80%) Management Information System
3 4 (7.84%) Data Centre
3 4 (7.84%) Equities
4 2 (3.92%) Distributed Systems
4 2 (3.92%) Hybrid Cloud
5 1 (1.96%) Cloud Security Posture
5 1 (1.96%) Credit Risk
5 1 (1.96%) Security Posture
5 1 (1.96%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 9 (17.65%) Linux
2 8 (15.69%) Windows
3 5 (9.80%) Unix
4 1 (1.96%) Amazon Linux
4 1 (1.96%) Debian
4 1 (1.96%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 51 (100.00%) DevOps
2 31 (60.78%) CI/CD
3 19 (37.25%) Infrastructure as Code
4 18 (35.29%) Agile
5 12 (23.53%) Artificial Intelligence
6 10 (19.61%) Observability
6 10 (19.61%) SDLC
7 9 (17.65%) Containerisation
7 9 (17.65%) Site Reliability Engineering
8 8 (15.69%) Machine Learning
8 8 (15.69%) Performance Optimisation
8 8 (15.69%) Problem-Solving
8 8 (15.69%) Software Engineering
9 7 (13.73%) Incident Response
9 7 (13.73%) Infrastructure Engineering
9 7 (13.73%) Line Management
9 7 (13.73%) Microservices
10 6 (11.76%) Decision-Making
10 6 (11.76%) Mentoring
11 5 (9.80%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 12 (23.53%) Python
2 5 (9.80%) Go
3 4 (7.84%) Bash
3 4 (7.84%) Lua
4 2 (3.92%) Bicep
4 2 (3.92%) Java
4 2 (3.92%) SQL
5 1 (1.96%) JavaScript
5 1 (1.96%) PHP
5 1 (1.96%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 11 (21.57%) Security Cleared
2 9 (17.65%) SC Cleared
3 5 (9.80%) DV Cleared
4 2 (3.92%) Azure Certification
5 1 (1.96%) Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (3.92%) QA
2 1 (1.96%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 1 (1.96%) PMO
System Software
1 18 (35.29%) Docker
Systems Management
1 25 (49.02%) Kubernetes
2 24 (47.06%) Terraform
3 13 (25.49%) Ansible
4 10 (19.61%) Grafana
5 8 (15.69%) Prometheus
6 2 (3.92%) Progress Chef
7 1 (1.96%) Argo
7 1 (1.96%) Kiali
7 1 (1.96%) Puppet
Vendors
1 4 (7.84%) MKS
1 4 (7.84%) MuleSoft
2 3 (5.88%) Microsoft
3 1 (1.96%) AppDynamics
3 1 (1.96%) Red Hat
3 1 (1.96%) Splunk
3 1 (1.96%) VMware