Lead DevOps Job Trends

Lead Development Operations
UK

The median Lead Development Operations salary in the UK is £84,250 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 26 November 2025.

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

6 months to
26 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 579 637 570
Rank change year-on-year +58 -67 +261
Permanent jobs requiring a Lead DevOps 74 113 154
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.14% 0.17% 0.30%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.15% 0.18% 0.32%
Number of salaries quoted 58 66 132
10th Percentile £63,375 - £70,000
25th Percentile £75,625 £66,500 £75,938
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £84,250 £73,250 £85,000
Median % change year-on-year +15.02% -13.82% -8.11%
75th Percentile £94,375 £89,688 £95,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £110,556 £117,236
UK excluding London median annual salary £80,000 £72,500 £81,750
% change year-on-year +10.34% -11.31% +2.19%

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 48,411 63,382 48,702
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 90.23% 94.34% 95.31%
Number of salaries quoted 30,519 35,483 37,888
10th Percentile £28,250 £32,000 £31,250
25th Percentile £35,896 £42,500 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £57,500 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% -4.17% -
75th Percentile £75,000 £76,250 £80,000
90th Percentile £92,500 £95,000 £97,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £47,500 £52,000 £52,500
% change year-on-year -8.65% -0.95% -

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 26 November 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 26 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 73 £85,000 +16.04% 25
UK excluding London +56 49 £80,000 +10.34% 22
Work from Home +85 22 £80,000 -5.88% 10
London +57 21 £95,000 -11.71% 5
North of England +38 20 £80,000 +17.65% 8
West Midlands +67 14 £85,000 +19.49% 2
Midlands +51 14 £85,000 +21.43% 5
South East +40 12 £83,500 -1.76% 4
Yorkshire +2 12 £80,000 +17.65% 1
North East +23 6 £95,000 -5.00%
South West +15 3 £70,000 -3.45% 5
North West +42 2 £85,000 -10.18% 7

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

For the 6 months to 26 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 74 (100.00%) DevOps
2 39 (52.70%) CI/CD
3 38 (51.35%) AWS
4 31 (41.89%) Kubernetes
5 30 (40.54%) Infrastructure as Code
6 29 (39.19%) Terraform
7 27 (36.49%) Azure
8 25 (33.78%) Agile
9 22 (29.73%) Docker
10 20 (27.03%) Security Cleared
11 16 (21.62%) Ansible
12 13 (17.57%) GCP
12 13 (17.57%) Observability
13 12 (16.22%) Python
13 12 (16.22%) Site Reliability Engineering
14 11 (14.86%) AI
14 11 (14.86%) Azure DevOps
14 11 (14.86%) Containerisation
14 11 (14.86%) Grafana
14 11 (14.86%) Prometheus
14 11 (14.86%) SC Cleared
15 10 (13.51%) DV Cleared
15 10 (13.51%) GitLab
15 10 (13.51%) Linux
15 10 (13.51%) Performance Optimisation
15 10 (13.51%) Windows
16 9 (12.16%) Incident Response
16 9 (12.16%) Infrastructure Engineering
16 9 (12.16%) Line Management
16 9 (12.16%) Problem-Solving

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 (1.35%) Apache Solr
1 1 (1.35%) Confluence
1 1 (1.35%) nginx
1 1 (1.35%) WebLogic
Cloud Services
1 38 (51.35%) AWS
2 27 (36.49%) Azure
3 13 (17.57%) GCP
4 11 (14.86%) Azure DevOps
5 8 (10.81%) GitHub
6 7 (9.46%) GitHub Actions
7 4 (5.41%) Amazon ECS
8 3 (4.05%) Amazon EKS
8 3 (4.05%) Apigee
8 3 (4.05%) AWS CloudFormation
8 3 (4.05%) Kong
9 2 (2.70%) Amazon S3
9 2 (2.70%) Pulumi
9 2 (2.70%) SaaS
10 1 (1.35%) Amazon GuardDuty
10 1 (1.35%) AWS CodePipeline
10 1 (1.35%) AWS Control Tower
10 1 (1.35%) Azure AKS
10 1 (1.35%) Salesforce Service Cloud
10 1 (1.35%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 4 (5.41%) Firewall
2 3 (4.05%) Network Security
3 2 (2.70%) DNS
4 1 (1.35%) Broadband
4 1 (1.35%) HTTPS
4 1 (1.35%) IPsec
4 1 (1.35%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 3 (4.05%) KDB
2 2 (2.70%) NoSQL
3 1 (1.35%) Amazon RDS
3 1 (1.35%) Couchbase
3 1 (1.35%) Metadata
3 1 (1.35%) MySQL
3 1 (1.35%) RDBMS
3 1 (1.35%) Relational Database
Development Applications
1 10 (13.51%) GitLab
2 3 (4.05%) Git
2 3 (4.05%) Jenkins
3 2 (2.70%) JIRA
3 2 (2.70%) Robot Framework
3 2 (2.70%) Selenium
3 2 (2.70%) Snyk
4 1 (1.35%) Bitbucket
4 1 (1.35%) CircleCI
4 1 (1.35%) Jaeger
General
1 14 (18.92%) Finance
2 10 (13.51%) Banking
3 8 (10.81%) Inclusion and Diversity
3 8 (10.81%) Social Skills
4 7 (9.46%) Law
5 4 (5.41%) Investment Banking
6 3 (4.05%) Analytical Skills
6 3 (4.05%) Corporate Banking
6 3 (4.05%) Financial Institution
6 3 (4.05%) Private Banking
7 2 (2.70%) Public Sector
8 1 (1.35%) Aviation
8 1 (1.35%) Organisational Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 3 (4.05%) OpenAPI
1 3 (4.05%) RESTful
1 3 (4.05%) Swagger
2 2 (2.70%) ARM Templates
2 2 (2.70%) Elastic Stack
2 2 (2.70%) Middleware
2 2 (2.70%) OpenTelemetry
3 1 (1.35%) .NET
3 1 (1.35%) LAMP
3 1 (1.35%) Lightning Web Components
3 1 (1.35%) RabbitMQ
3 1 (1.35%) REST
3 1 (1.35%) SOAP
3 1 (1.35%) Visualforce
3 1 (1.35%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 16 (21.62%) Cloud Native
2 4 (5.41%) Data Centre
3 3 (4.05%) Equities
3 3 (4.05%) Management Information System
3 3 (4.05%) Product Ownership
4 1 (1.35%) Distributed Systems
4 1 (1.35%) Greenfield Project
4 1 (1.35%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 10 (13.51%) Linux
1 10 (13.51%) Windows
2 6 (8.11%) Unix
3 1 (1.35%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 74 (100.00%) DevOps
2 39 (52.70%) CI/CD
3 30 (40.54%) Infrastructure as Code
4 25 (33.78%) Agile
5 13 (17.57%) Observability
6 12 (16.22%) Site Reliability Engineering
7 11 (14.86%) AI
7 11 (14.86%) Containerisation
8 10 (13.51%) Performance Optimisation
9 9 (12.16%) Incident Response
9 9 (12.16%) Infrastructure Engineering
9 9 (12.16%) Line Management
9 9 (12.16%) Problem-Solving
10 7 (9.46%) Continuous Improvement
10 7 (9.46%) Mentoring
10 7 (9.46%) SDLC
10 7 (9.46%) Software Engineering
11 6 (8.11%) DevSecOps
11 6 (8.11%) Machine Learning
11 6 (8.11%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 12 (16.22%) Python
2 7 (9.46%) Go
3 5 (6.76%) JavaScript
4 4 (5.41%) Bash
5 3 (4.05%) Bicep
5 3 (4.05%) Lua
6 2 (2.70%) Java
7 1 (1.35%) Apex Code
7 1 (1.35%) PHP
7 1 (1.35%) PowerShell
7 1 (1.35%) SQL
Qualifications
1 20 (27.03%) Security Cleared
2 11 (14.86%) SC Cleared
3 10 (13.51%) DV Cleared
4 2 (2.70%) AWS Certification
4 2 (2.70%) Azure Certification
5 1 (1.35%) Computer Science Degree
5 1 (1.35%) Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (1.35%) QA
System Software
1 22 (29.73%) Docker
Systems Management
1 31 (41.89%) Kubernetes
2 29 (39.19%) Terraform
3 16 (21.62%) Ansible
4 11 (14.86%) Grafana
4 11 (14.86%) Prometheus
5 2 (2.70%) Argo
6 1 (1.35%) Kustomize
Vendors
1 4 (5.41%) Microsoft
2 3 (4.05%) MKS
2 3 (4.05%) MuleSoft
3 2 (2.70%) Black Duck
3 2 (2.70%) Coverity
4 1 (1.35%) Google
4 1 (1.35%) Salesforce
4 1 (1.35%) VMware