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 4 May 2026.

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

6 months to
4 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 583 607 739
Rank change year-on-year +24 +132 -5
Permanent jobs requiring a Lead DevOps 134 47 145
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.15% 0.11% 0.15%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.16% 0.12% 0.16%
Number of salaries quoted 117 36 130
10th Percentile £66,000 £69,250 £66,500
25th Percentile £77,500 £81,875 £72,528
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £85,000 £88,750 £81,250
Median % change year-on-year -4.23% +9.23% -9.72%
75th Percentile £95,000 £111,250 £95,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £123,750 £115,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £83,774 £85,000 £81,250
% change year-on-year -1.44% +4.62% +3.50%

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 83,957 38,400 90,620
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 92.97% 89.39% 94.55%
Number of salaries quoted 54,111 23,425 66,674
10th Percentile £30,000 £30,425 £28,500
25th Percentile £40,000 £41,375 £38,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £59,000 £52,900
Median % change year-on-year -6.78% +11.53% -11.83%
75th Percentile £75,000 £77,500 £71,250
90th Percentile £95,000 £100,000 £90,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £52,500 £50,000
% change year-on-year -4.76% +5.00% -5.66%

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 4 May 2026.

Salary histogram for Lead DevOps in the UK

Lead DevOps
Top 16 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 4 May 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 +26 119 £87,500 -1.41% 20
UK excluding London 0 77 £83,774 -1.44% 16
Work from Home +35 56 £85,000 -2.86% 16
London +24 40 £100,000 -11.11% 6
Midlands -3 33 £85,000 -22.73% 3
North of England -45 27 £85,000 -2.86% 11
East Midlands - 17 £85,000 -
West Midlands +2 16 £87,500 -20.45% 3
North West -23 12 £85,000 -5.56% 4
Yorkshire -52 10 £80,000 +17.65% 4
South West -44 7 £80,000 +3.90%
North East - 5 £90,000 - 3
South East -31 4 £80,000 -5.88% 1
East of England - 3 £70,000 -
Scotland -22 2 £55,000 -35.29%
Wales - 1 £74,000 - 1

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

For the 6 months to 4 May 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.

1 134 (100.00%) DevOps
2 50 (37.31%) CI/CD
3 47 (35.07%) Azure
4 45 (33.58%) Infrastructure as Code
4 45 (33.58%) Terraform
5 42 (31.34%) Kubernetes
6 37 (27.61%) AWS
7 32 (23.88%) Agile
8 31 (23.13%) Docker
9 23 (17.16%) Observability
10 22 (16.42%) Azure DevOps
10 22 (16.42%) Python
11 20 (14.93%) Site Reliability Engineering
12 19 (14.18%) Mentoring
13 18 (13.43%) Ansible
14 17 (12.69%) Containerisation
15 15 (11.19%) GitHub
16 14 (10.45%) GCP
16 14 (10.45%) Incident Response
16 14 (10.45%) Performance Optimisation
16 14 (10.45%) Security Cleared
17 13 (9.70%) Line Management
17 13 (9.70%) Prometheus
18 12 (8.96%) GitHub Actions
18 12 (8.96%) Java
18 12 (8.96%) Linux
18 12 (8.96%) Platform Engineering
19 11 (8.21%) GitLab
19 11 (8.21%) Go
19 11 (8.21%) Grafana

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 (2.24%) Confluence
2 1 (0.75%) SAS
2 1 (0.75%) SharePoint
Applications
1 1 (0.75%) EngageOne
Business Applications
1 1 (0.75%) Teamcenter
1 1 (0.75%) TIBCO iProcess
Cloud Services
1 47 (35.07%) Azure
2 37 (27.61%) AWS
3 22 (16.42%) Azure DevOps
4 15 (11.19%) GitHub
5 14 (10.45%) GCP
6 12 (8.96%) GitHub Actions
7 7 (5.22%) PaaS
7 7 (5.22%) SaaS
8 5 (3.73%) IaaS
9 4 (2.99%) Amazon EKS
9 4 (2.99%) Amazon Kinesis
9 4 (2.99%) Pulumi
10 2 (1.49%) AWS CloudFormation
10 2 (1.49%) AWS Control Tower
10 2 (1.49%) Azure AKS
10 2 (1.49%) Azure Monitor
10 2 (1.49%) BrowserStack
10 2 (1.49%) Serverless
11 1 (0.75%) AWS CodePipeline
11 1 (0.75%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 4 (2.99%) Broadband
2 2 (1.49%) DSL
3 1 (0.75%) Firewall
3 1 (0.75%) LAN
3 1 (0.75%) TCP/IP
3 1 (0.75%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (2.99%) Flink
1 4 (2.99%) NoSQL
1 4 (2.99%) RDBMS
1 4 (2.99%) Relational Database
2 2 (1.49%) Metadata
3 1 (0.75%) Amazon RDS
3 1 (0.75%) MariaDB
3 1 (0.75%) MySQL
3 1 (0.75%) PostgreSQL
Development Applications
1 11 (8.21%) GitLab
2 7 (5.22%) Git
3 6 (4.48%) Jenkins
3 6 (4.48%) JIRA
4 4 (2.99%) Jaeger
5 3 (2.24%) Selenium
6 1 (0.75%) Bitbucket
6 1 (0.75%) WebDriver
General
1 16 (11.94%) Finance
2 12 (8.96%) Retail
3 8 (5.97%) Banking
3 8 (5.97%) Public Sector
4 7 (5.22%) Inclusion and Diversity
4 7 (5.22%) Social Skills
5 4 (2.99%) Analytical Skills
5 4 (2.99%) Front Office
6 3 (2.24%) Investment Banking
7 2 (1.49%) Corporate Banking
7 2 (1.49%) Financial Institution
7 2 (1.49%) Games
7 2 (1.49%) Private Banking
8 1 (0.75%) Documentation Skills
8 1 (0.75%) Health Technology
8 1 (0.75%) Law
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 8 (5.97%) .NET
1 8 (5.97%) React
2 6 (4.48%) Node.js
3 5 (3.73%) OpenTelemetry
4 4 (2.99%) ARM Templates
4 4 (2.99%) Elastic Stack
4 4 (2.99%) Kafka
5 2 (1.49%) Playwright
6 1 (0.75%) .NET Core
6 1 (0.75%) CSS
6 1 (0.75%) HTML
6 1 (0.75%) JSON
6 1 (0.75%) Lightning Web Components
6 1 (0.75%) Middleware
6 1 (0.75%) REST
6 1 (0.75%) SOAP
6 1 (0.75%) Visualforce
Miscellaneous
1 10 (7.46%) Cloud Native
2 5 (3.73%) Product Ownership
3 3 (2.24%) Enterprise Storage
3 3 (2.24%) Management Information System
4 2 (1.49%) Hybrid Cloud
4 2 (1.49%) Social Media
5 1 (0.75%) Analytical Mindset
5 1 (0.75%) CMDB
5 1 (0.75%) Greenfield Project
5 1 (0.75%) PKI
5 1 (0.75%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 12 (8.96%) Linux
2 7 (5.22%) Unix
3 5 (3.73%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 1 (0.75%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 134 (100.00%) DevOps
2 50 (37.31%) CI/CD
3 45 (33.58%) Infrastructure as Code
4 32 (23.88%) Agile
5 23 (17.16%) Observability
6 20 (14.93%) Site Reliability Engineering
7 19 (14.18%) Mentoring
8 17 (12.69%) Containerisation
9 14 (10.45%) Incident Response
9 14 (10.45%) Performance Optimisation
10 13 (9.70%) Line Management
11 12 (8.96%) Platform Engineering
12 11 (8.21%) Infrastructure Engineering
13 10 (7.46%) Continuous Improvement
13 10 (7.46%) Incident Management
14 9 (6.72%) Roadmaps
15 8 (5.97%) Coaching
15 8 (5.97%) DevSecOps
15 8 (5.97%) Technical Leadership
15 8 (5.97%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 22 (16.42%) Python
2 12 (8.96%) Java
3 11 (8.21%) Go
4 10 (7.46%) Bash
5 9 (6.72%) JavaScript
6 4 (2.99%) Bicep
6 4 (2.99%) SQL
7 3 (2.24%) C#
7 3 (2.24%) PowerShell
8 2 (1.49%) TypeScript
9 1 (0.75%) Apex Code
Qualifications
1 14 (10.45%) Security Cleared
2 9 (6.72%) SC Cleared
3 5 (3.73%) AWS Certification
4 3 (2.24%) DV Cleared
5 1 (0.75%) Azure Certification
5 1 (0.75%) Computer Science Degree
5 1 (0.75%) Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (0.75%) Data Quality
1 1 (0.75%) NIST
1 1 (0.75%) QA
System Software
1 31 (23.13%) Docker
2 2 (1.49%) VMware Infrastructure
3 1 (0.75%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (0.75%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 45 (33.58%) Terraform
2 42 (31.34%) Kubernetes
3 18 (13.43%) Ansible
4 13 (9.70%) Prometheus
5 11 (8.21%) Grafana
6 10 (7.46%) Argo
7 4 (2.99%) Kustomize
8 3 (2.24%) Packer
9 1 (0.75%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 7 (5.22%) Google
2 5 (3.73%) Red Hat
3 4 (2.99%) VMware
4 3 (2.24%) Microsoft
5 2 (1.49%) Pega
5 2 (1.49%) ServiceNow
6 1 (0.75%) Dynatrace
6 1 (0.75%) Pure Storage
6 1 (0.75%) Salesforce
6 1 (0.75%) TIBCO