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 8 April 2026.

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

6 months to
8 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 588 570 723
Rank change year-on-year -18 +153 +28
Permanent jobs requiring a Lead DevOps 123 56 136
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.15% 0.14% 0.15%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.16% 0.15% 0.16%
Number of salaries quoted 107 38 127
10th Percentile £63,250 £68,500 £67,500
25th Percentile £76,250 £77,188 £76,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £85,000 £87,500 £82,500
Median % change year-on-year -2.86% +6.06% -8.33%
75th Percentile £95,000 £109,063 £95,625
90th Percentile £100,000 £123,750 £115,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £80,000 £85,000 £82,500
% change year-on-year -5.88% +3.03% +6.45%

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 76,515 36,725 86,098
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 92.40% 89.80% 94.54%
Number of salaries quoted 49,212 23,272 64,527
10th Percentile £30,000 £31,250 £28,501
25th Percentile £40,000 £42,500 £38,750
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £60,000 £54,500
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +10.09% -9.17%
75th Percentile £75,000 £78,750 £72,000
90th Percentile £95,000 £100,000 £90,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £52,600 £50,000
% change year-on-year -4.94% +5.20% -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 8 April 2026.

Salary histogram for Lead DevOps in the UK

Lead DevOps
Top 15 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 8 April 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 +1 109 £85,000 -2.86% 23
UK excluding London -26 71 £80,000 -5.88% 17
Work from Home +28 45 £80,000 -8.57% 9
London +9 35 £100,000 -11.11% 7
Midlands -11 32 £85,000 -22.73% 7
North of England -49 19 £85,000 -2.86% 4
West Midlands +13 18 £85,000 -22.73% 2
East Midlands - 14 £100,000 - 5
North West -35 8 £85,000 -5.56% 3
South East -38 8 £75,000 -9.09% 1
South West -39 7 £80,000 +15.94% 1
Yorkshire -51 7 £80,000 +17.65% 1
North East - 4 £95,000 -
East of England - 3 £70,000 - 4
Scotland -23 2 £55,000 -38.89%

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

For the 6 months to 8 April 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.

1 123 (100.00%) DevOps
2 52 (42.28%) CI/CD
3 43 (34.96%) Infrastructure as Code
4 42 (34.15%) Terraform
5 41 (33.33%) Kubernetes
6 38 (30.89%) AWS
6 38 (30.89%) Azure
7 32 (26.02%) Agile
7 32 (26.02%) Docker
8 24 (19.51%) Observability
9 21 (17.07%) Site Reliability Engineering
10 20 (16.26%) Python
11 19 (15.45%) Ansible
12 18 (14.63%) Azure DevOps
13 15 (12.20%) GCP
13 15 (12.20%) GitHub
13 15 (12.20%) Incident Response
13 15 (12.20%) Mentoring
13 15 (12.20%) Performance Optimisation
13 15 (12.20%) Security Cleared
14 14 (11.38%) Containerisation
14 14 (11.38%) Linux
14 14 (11.38%) Prometheus
15 13 (10.57%) Java
16 12 (9.76%) GitHub Actions
16 12 (9.76%) Go
16 12 (9.76%) Grafana
16 12 (9.76%) Infrastructure Engineering
16 12 (9.76%) Line Management
17 11 (8.94%) GitLab

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 3 (2.44%) Confluence
2 1 (0.81%) SAS
2 1 (0.81%) SharePoint
2 1 (0.81%) WebLogic
Applications
1 1 (0.81%) EngageOne
Business Applications
1 1 (0.81%) Teamcenter
1 1 (0.81%) TIBCO iProcess
Cloud Services
1 38 (30.89%) AWS
1 38 (30.89%) Azure
2 18 (14.63%) Azure DevOps
3 15 (12.20%) GCP
3 15 (12.20%) GitHub
4 12 (9.76%) GitHub Actions
5 7 (5.69%) PaaS
6 5 (4.07%) IaaS
7 4 (3.25%) Amazon EKS
7 4 (3.25%) Amazon Kinesis
7 4 (3.25%) Pulumi
7 4 (3.25%) SaaS
8 2 (1.63%) AWS CloudFormation
8 2 (1.63%) AWS Control Tower
8 2 (1.63%) Azure AKS
8 2 (1.63%) Azure Monitor
8 2 (1.63%) BrowserStack
8 2 (1.63%) Serverless
9 1 (0.81%) AWS CodePipeline
9 1 (0.81%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 4 (3.25%) Broadband
2 2 (1.63%) DSL
3 1 (0.81%) Firewall
3 1 (0.81%) LAN
3 1 (0.81%) TCP/IP
3 1 (0.81%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (3.25%) Flink
1 4 (3.25%) NoSQL
1 4 (3.25%) RDBMS
1 4 (3.25%) Relational Database
2 2 (1.63%) Metadata
3 1 (0.81%) Amazon RDS
3 1 (0.81%) MariaDB
3 1 (0.81%) MySQL
3 1 (0.81%) PostgreSQL
Development Applications
1 11 (8.94%) GitLab
2 6 (4.88%) JIRA
3 5 (4.07%) Jenkins
4 4 (3.25%) Git
4 4 (3.25%) Jaeger
5 3 (2.44%) Selenium
6 1 (0.81%) Bitbucket
6 1 (0.81%) WebDriver
General
1 17 (13.82%) Finance
2 9 (7.32%) Banking
3 8 (6.50%) Retail
4 6 (4.88%) Inclusion and Diversity
4 6 (4.88%) Social Skills
5 4 (3.25%) Analytical Skills
5 4 (3.25%) Front Office
5 4 (3.25%) Investment Banking
5 4 (3.25%) Public Sector
6 3 (2.44%) Corporate Banking
6 3 (2.44%) Financial Institution
6 3 (2.44%) Private Banking
7 2 (1.63%) Games
8 1 (0.81%) Documentation Skills
8 1 (0.81%) Health Technology
8 1 (0.81%) Law
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 7 (5.69%) React
2 6 (4.88%) .NET
3 5 (4.07%) ARM Templates
3 5 (4.07%) OpenTelemetry
4 4 (3.25%) Elastic Stack
4 4 (3.25%) Kafka
4 4 (3.25%) Node.js
5 2 (1.63%) Middleware
5 2 (1.63%) Playwright
6 1 (0.81%) .NET Core
6 1 (0.81%) CSS
6 1 (0.81%) HTML
6 1 (0.81%) JSON
6 1 (0.81%) Lightning Web Components
6 1 (0.81%) REST
6 1 (0.81%) SOAP
6 1 (0.81%) Visualforce
Miscellaneous
1 10 (8.13%) Cloud Native
2 5 (4.07%) Product Ownership
3 3 (2.44%) Enterprise Storage
3 3 (2.44%) Management Information System
4 2 (1.63%) Hybrid Cloud
4 2 (1.63%) Social Media
5 1 (0.81%) Analytical Mindset
5 1 (0.81%) CMDB
5 1 (0.81%) Greenfield Project
5 1 (0.81%) PKI
5 1 (0.81%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 14 (11.38%) Linux
2 8 (6.50%) Unix
3 5 (4.07%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 2 (1.63%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 123 (100.00%) DevOps
2 52 (42.28%) CI/CD
3 43 (34.96%) Infrastructure as Code
4 32 (26.02%) Agile
5 24 (19.51%) Observability
6 21 (17.07%) Site Reliability Engineering
7 15 (12.20%) Incident Response
7 15 (12.20%) Mentoring
7 15 (12.20%) Performance Optimisation
8 14 (11.38%) Containerisation
9 12 (9.76%) Infrastructure Engineering
9 12 (9.76%) Line Management
10 11 (8.94%) Platform Engineering
11 10 (8.13%) Incident Management
12 9 (7.32%) Continuous Improvement
13 8 (6.50%) DevSecOps
13 8 (6.50%) Roadmaps
14 7 (5.69%) Continuous Integration
14 7 (5.69%) Disaster Recovery
14 7 (5.69%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 20 (16.26%) Python
2 13 (10.57%) Java
3 12 (9.76%) Go
4 10 (8.13%) JavaScript
5 7 (5.69%) Bash
6 4 (3.25%) Bicep
6 4 (3.25%) SQL
7 3 (2.44%) C#
8 2 (1.63%) PowerShell
8 2 (1.63%) TypeScript
9 1 (0.81%) Apex Code
Qualifications
1 15 (12.20%) Security Cleared
2 8 (6.50%) SC Cleared
3 6 (4.88%) AWS Certification
4 4 (3.25%) DV Cleared
5 2 (1.63%) Azure Certification
6 1 (0.81%) Computer Science Degree
6 1 (0.81%) Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (0.81%) Data Quality
1 1 (0.81%) NIST
1 1 (0.81%) QA
System Software
1 32 (26.02%) Docker
2 2 (1.63%) VMware Infrastructure
3 1 (0.81%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (0.81%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 42 (34.15%) Terraform
2 41 (33.33%) Kubernetes
3 19 (15.45%) Ansible
4 14 (11.38%) Prometheus
5 12 (9.76%) Grafana
6 10 (8.13%) Argo
7 4 (3.25%) Kustomize
8 3 (2.44%) Packer
9 1 (0.81%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 7 (5.69%) Google
2 5 (4.07%) Red Hat
3 4 (3.25%) VMware
4 3 (2.44%) Microsoft
5 2 (1.63%) Pega
5 2 (1.63%) ServiceNow
6 1 (0.81%) Dynatrace
6 1 (0.81%) Pure Storage
6 1 (0.81%) Salesforce
6 1 (0.81%) TIBCO