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 November 2025.

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

6 months to
19 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 577 641 564
Rank change year-on-year +64 -77 +267
Permanent jobs requiring a Lead DevOps 76 115 162
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.14% 0.17% 0.31%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.16% 0.18% 0.33%
Number of salaries quoted 57 68 140
10th Percentile £63,250 - £70,000
25th Percentile £77,500 £66,500 £77,188
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £85,000 £73,250 £85,000
Median % change year-on-year +16.04% -13.82% -8.11%
75th Percentile £95,000 £89,063 £95,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £110,556 £117,512
UK excluding London median annual salary £80,000 £71,250 £82,500
% change year-on-year +12.28% -13.64% +3.13%

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 47,639 63,412 49,716
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 90.05% 94.54% 95.39%
Number of salaries quoted 29,798 35,443 38,501
10th Percentile £28,250 £31,750 £31,250
25th Percentile £35,500 £42,500 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £53,000 £57,500 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year -7.83% -4.17% -
75th Percentile £73,750 £75,500 £80,000
90th Percentile £92,500 £95,000 £97,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £47,500 £51,242 £52,500
% change year-on-year -7.30% -2.40% -

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 19 November 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 November 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 +78 74 £85,000 +16.04% 32
UK excluding London +57 49 £80,000 +12.28% 26
London +53 23 £95,000 -11.71% 7
Work from Home +72 22 £80,000 -5.88% 16
North of England +41 20 £80,000 +17.65% 7
Midlands +59 14 £85,000 +21.43% 6
West Midlands +55 14 £85,000 +19.49% 3
South East +32 12 £83,500 -3.19% 4
Yorkshire -4 12 £80,000 +17.65%
North East +9 6 £95,000 -5.00%
North West +26 2 £85,000 -10.18% 7
South West +21 2 £78,225 +7.90% 8
Scotland -1 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 19 November 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 76 (100.00%) DevOps
2 42 (55.26%) CI/CD
3 41 (53.95%) AWS
4 32 (42.11%) Kubernetes
5 31 (40.79%) Infrastructure as Code
5 31 (40.79%) Terraform
6 28 (36.84%) Azure
7 27 (35.53%) Agile
8 23 (30.26%) Docker
9 20 (26.32%) Security Cleared
10 17 (22.37%) Ansible
11 14 (18.42%) GCP
11 14 (18.42%) Python
12 13 (17.11%) AI
12 13 (17.11%) Observability
12 13 (17.11%) Site Reliability Engineering
13 12 (15.79%) Containerisation
13 12 (15.79%) Grafana
13 12 (15.79%) Prometheus
14 11 (14.47%) Azure DevOps
14 11 (14.47%) GitLab
14 11 (14.47%) SC Cleared
15 10 (13.16%) DV Cleared
15 10 (13.16%) Linux
15 10 (13.16%) Performance Optimisation
15 10 (13.16%) Problem-Solving
15 10 (13.16%) Windows
16 9 (11.84%) Incident Response
16 9 (11.84%) Infrastructure Engineering
16 9 (11.84%) Line Management

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 1 (1.32%) Apache Solr
1 1 (1.32%) Confluence
1 1 (1.32%) nginx
1 1 (1.32%) WebLogic
Cloud Services
1 41 (53.95%) AWS
2 28 (36.84%) Azure
3 14 (18.42%) GCP
4 11 (14.47%) Azure DevOps
5 8 (10.53%) GitHub
6 7 (9.21%) GitHub Actions
7 5 (6.58%) Amazon ECS
8 4 (5.26%) Amazon EKS
8 4 (5.26%) Apigee
8 4 (5.26%) AWS CloudFormation
8 4 (5.26%) Kong
9 2 (2.63%) Amazon S3
9 2 (2.63%) Pulumi
9 2 (2.63%) SaaS
10 1 (1.32%) Amazon GuardDuty
10 1 (1.32%) AWS Control Tower
10 1 (1.32%) Azure AKS
10 1 (1.32%) Cloudflare
10 1 (1.32%) Salesforce Service Cloud
10 1 (1.32%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 4 (5.26%) Firewall
2 3 (3.95%) Network Security
3 2 (2.63%) DNS
4 1 (1.32%) Broadband
4 1 (1.32%) HTTPS
4 1 (1.32%) IPsec
4 1 (1.32%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (5.26%) KDB
2 2 (2.63%) NoSQL
3 1 (1.32%) Amazon RDS
3 1 (1.32%) Couchbase
3 1 (1.32%) Metadata
3 1 (1.32%) MySQL
3 1 (1.32%) RDBMS
3 1 (1.32%) Relational Database
Development Applications
1 11 (14.47%) GitLab
2 4 (5.26%) Jenkins
3 3 (3.95%) Git
4 2 (2.63%) JIRA
4 2 (2.63%) Robot Framework
4 2 (2.63%) Selenium
4 2 (2.63%) Snyk
5 1 (1.32%) Bitbucket
5 1 (1.32%) CircleCI
5 1 (1.32%) Jaeger
General
1 17 (22.37%) Finance
2 12 (15.79%) Banking
3 11 (14.47%) Inclusion and Diversity
4 10 (13.16%) Law
5 8 (10.53%) Social Skills
6 4 (5.26%) Investment Banking
7 3 (3.95%) Analytical Skills
7 3 (3.95%) Corporate Banking
7 3 (3.95%) Financial Institution
7 3 (3.95%) Private Banking
8 2 (2.63%) Public Sector
9 1 (1.32%) Aviation
9 1 (1.32%) Marketing
9 1 (1.32%) Organisational Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 4 (5.26%) OpenAPI
1 4 (5.26%) RESTful
1 4 (5.26%) Swagger
2 2 (2.63%) ARM Templates
2 2 (2.63%) Elastic Stack
2 2 (2.63%) Middleware
2 2 (2.63%) OpenTelemetry
3 1 (1.32%) .NET
3 1 (1.32%) LAMP
3 1 (1.32%) Lightning Web Components
3 1 (1.32%) RabbitMQ
3 1 (1.32%) REST
3 1 (1.32%) SOAP
3 1 (1.32%) Visualforce
3 1 (1.32%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 18 (23.68%) Cloud Native
2 4 (5.26%) Data Centre
2 4 (5.26%) Equities
2 4 (5.26%) Management Information System
3 3 (3.95%) Product Ownership
4 1 (1.32%) Credit Risk
4 1 (1.32%) Distributed Systems
4 1 (1.32%) Greenfield Project
4 1 (1.32%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 10 (13.16%) Linux
1 10 (13.16%) Windows
2 7 (9.21%) Unix
3 1 (1.32%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 76 (100.00%) DevOps
2 42 (55.26%) CI/CD
3 31 (40.79%) Infrastructure as Code
4 27 (35.53%) Agile
5 13 (17.11%) AI
5 13 (17.11%) Observability
5 13 (17.11%) Site Reliability Engineering
6 12 (15.79%) Containerisation
7 10 (13.16%) Performance Optimisation
7 10 (13.16%) Problem-Solving
8 9 (11.84%) Incident Response
8 9 (11.84%) Infrastructure Engineering
8 9 (11.84%) Line Management
8 9 (11.84%) SDLC
8 9 (11.84%) Software Engineering
9 8 (10.53%) Machine Learning
10 7 (9.21%) Continuous Improvement
10 7 (9.21%) Mentoring
11 6 (7.89%) Microservices
11 6 (7.89%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 14 (18.42%) Python
2 8 (10.53%) Go
3 5 (6.58%) JavaScript
4 4 (5.26%) Bash
4 4 (5.26%) Lua
5 3 (3.95%) Bicep
5 3 (3.95%) Java
6 2 (2.63%) SQL
7 1 (1.32%) Apex Code
7 1 (1.32%) PHP
7 1 (1.32%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 20 (26.32%) Security Cleared
2 11 (14.47%) SC Cleared
3 10 (13.16%) DV Cleared
4 2 (2.63%) AWS Certification
4 2 (2.63%) Azure Certification
5 1 (1.32%) Computer Science Degree
5 1 (1.32%) Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (1.32%) QA
System Software
1 23 (30.26%) Docker
Systems Management
1 32 (42.11%) Kubernetes
2 31 (40.79%) Terraform
3 17 (22.37%) Ansible
4 12 (15.79%) Grafana
4 12 (15.79%) Prometheus
5 2 (2.63%) Argo
6 1 (1.32%) Kustomize
6 1 (1.32%) Progress Chef
6 1 (1.32%) Puppet
Vendors
1 4 (5.26%) Microsoft
1 4 (5.26%) MKS
1 4 (5.26%) MuleSoft
2 2 (2.63%) Black Duck
2 2 (2.63%) Coverity
3 1 (1.32%) Google
3 1 (1.32%) Salesforce
3 1 (1.32%) VMware