Lead DevOps Job Trends

Lead Development Operations
UK

The median Lead Development Operations salary in the UK is £80,000 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 12 January 2026.

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

6 months to
12 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 566 611 576
Rank change year-on-year +45 -35 +221
Permanent jobs requiring a Lead DevOps 76 96 161
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.13% 0.18% 0.29%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.14% 0.19% 0.30%
Number of salaries quoted 69 54 141
10th Percentile £65,950 £66,500 £67,500
25th Percentile £77,500 £67,544 £74,750
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £80,000 £75,500 £85,000
Median % change year-on-year +5.96% -11.18% -5.56%
75th Percentile £91,250 £91,250 £95,000
90th Percentile £104,000 £108,875 £117,236
UK excluding London median annual salary £80,000 £72,500 £81,000
% change year-on-year +10.34% -10.49% +4.52%

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 53,744 49,685 53,403
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 90.63% 92.91% 95.27%
Number of salaries quoted 33,208 25,763 41,197
10th Percentile £28,500 £33,500 £30,000
25th Percentile £36,250 £45,000 £41,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £60,000 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £75,000 £78,750 £77,500
90th Percentile £95,000 £97,500 £96,250
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £52,500 £50,000
% change year-on-year -4.76% +5.00% -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 12 January 2026.

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 12 January 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 +69 71 £80,000 +6.67% 11
UK excluding London +26 45 £80,000 +10.34% 7
Work from Home +67 33 £80,000 -5.88% 10
London +55 20 £95,000 -11.63% 4
North of England +6 17 £80,000 +17.65% 2
Midlands +29 13 £80,000 +18.72% 3
West Midlands +32 12 £80,000 +23.51% 2
Yorkshire -14 10 £80,000 +17.65% 1
South East +18 8 £75,000 -11.76% 1
South West +7 7 £80,000 +10.34% 1
North West +29 4 £85,000 -10.18% 1
North East - 3 £95,000 -
East Midlands -7 1 - - 1

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

For the 6 months to 12 January 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 76 (100.00%) DevOps
2 42 (55.26%) CI/CD
3 35 (46.05%) Kubernetes
3 35 (46.05%) Terraform
4 34 (44.74%) AWS
4 34 (44.74%) Infrastructure as Code
5 32 (42.11%) Agile
5 32 (42.11%) Docker
6 30 (39.47%) Azure
7 22 (28.95%) Site Reliability Engineering
8 21 (27.63%) Ansible
9 19 (25.00%) Observability
10 18 (23.68%) Prometheus
11 17 (22.37%) GCP
11 17 (22.37%) Grafana
11 17 (22.37%) Performance Optimisation
12 16 (21.05%) GitLab
12 16 (21.05%) Incident Response
13 15 (19.74%) Python
14 14 (18.42%) Infrastructure Engineering
14 14 (18.42%) Line Management
15 12 (15.79%) Containerisation
15 12 (15.79%) GitHub
16 11 (14.47%) Azure DevOps
16 11 (14.47%) GitHub Actions
16 11 (14.47%) Mentoring
17 10 (13.16%) Go
17 10 (13.16%) Security Cleared
18 9 (11.84%) Argo
18 9 (11.84%) Java

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 2 (2.63%) Confluence
2 1 (1.32%) WebLogic
Cloud Services
1 34 (44.74%) AWS
2 30 (39.47%) Azure
3 17 (22.37%) GCP
4 12 (15.79%) GitHub
5 11 (14.47%) Azure DevOps
5 11 (14.47%) GitHub Actions
6 4 (5.26%) Amazon EKS
6 4 (5.26%) Amazon Kinesis
6 4 (5.26%) Pulumi
7 3 (3.95%) PaaS
8 2 (2.63%) AWS CloudFormation
8 2 (2.63%) Azure Monitor
8 2 (2.63%) SaaS
9 1 (1.32%) Amazon ECS
9 1 (1.32%) AWS Lambda
9 1 (1.32%) Azure AKS
9 1 (1.32%) Cloudflare
9 1 (1.32%) Salesforce Service Cloud
9 1 (1.32%) Snowflake
9 1 (1.32%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 3 (3.95%) Broadband
2 1 (1.32%) DNS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (5.26%) Flink
2 3 (3.95%) NoSQL
2 3 (3.95%) RDBMS
2 3 (3.95%) Relational Database
3 1 (1.32%) Amazon RDS
3 1 (1.32%) Metadata
Development Applications
1 16 (21.05%) GitLab
2 4 (5.26%) Git
3 3 (3.95%) Jaeger
3 3 (3.95%) Jenkins
3 3 (3.95%) JIRA
3 3 (3.95%) Selenium
4 2 (2.63%) Robot Framework
4 2 (2.63%) Snyk
5 1 (1.32%) Bitbucket
5 1 (1.32%) CircleCI
5 1 (1.32%) WebDriver
General
1 15 (19.74%) Finance
2 8 (10.53%) Banking
3 6 (7.89%) Social Skills
4 5 (6.58%) Analytical Skills
5 4 (5.26%) Front Office
5 4 (5.26%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 4 (5.26%) Investment Banking
6 3 (3.95%) Corporate Banking
6 3 (3.95%) Financial Institution
6 3 (3.95%) Private Banking
7 2 (2.63%) Public Sector
8 1 (1.32%) Aviation
8 1 (1.32%) Documentation Skills
8 1 (1.32%) Law
8 1 (1.32%) Organisational Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 4 (5.26%) ARM Templates
1 4 (5.26%) Kafka
1 4 (5.26%) OpenTelemetry
1 4 (5.26%) React
2 3 (3.95%) Elastic Stack
3 2 (2.63%) .NET
3 2 (2.63%) Middleware
4 1 (1.32%) Lightning Web Components
4 1 (1.32%) REST
4 1 (1.32%) SOAP
4 1 (1.32%) Visualforce
Miscellaneous
1 15 (19.74%) Cloud Native
2 4 (5.26%) Product Ownership
3 2 (2.63%) Social Media
4 1 (1.32%) Analytical Mindset
4 1 (1.32%) Distributed Systems
4 1 (1.32%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 6 (7.89%) Linux
2 4 (5.26%) Unix
3 2 (2.63%) Windows
4 1 (1.32%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 76 (100.00%) DevOps
2 42 (55.26%) CI/CD
3 34 (44.74%) Infrastructure as Code
4 32 (42.11%) Agile
5 22 (28.95%) Site Reliability Engineering
6 19 (25.00%) Observability
7 17 (22.37%) Performance Optimisation
8 16 (21.05%) Incident Response
9 14 (18.42%) Infrastructure Engineering
9 14 (18.42%) Line Management
10 12 (15.79%) Containerisation
11 11 (14.47%) Mentoring
12 7 (9.21%) Incident Management
12 7 (9.21%) Roadmaps
13 6 (7.89%) Continuous Improvement
13 6 (7.89%) DevSecOps
13 6 (7.89%) Problem-Solving
13 6 (7.89%) Scrum
13 6 (7.89%) Test Automation
14 5 (6.58%) Deployment Automation
Programming Languages
1 15 (19.74%) Python
2 10 (13.16%) Go
3 9 (11.84%) Java
4 7 (9.21%) JavaScript
5 5 (6.58%) Bash
5 5 (6.58%) Bicep
6 3 (3.95%) SQL
7 2 (2.63%) C#
8 1 (1.32%) Apex Code
8 1 (1.32%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 10 (13.16%) Security Cleared
2 6 (7.89%) DV Cleared
3 5 (6.58%) AWS Certification
4 3 (3.95%) Azure Certification
5 2 (2.63%) SC Cleared
6 1 (1.32%) Computer Science Degree
6 1 (1.32%) Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (2.63%) QA
2 1 (1.32%) NIST
System Software
1 32 (42.11%) Docker
Systems Management
1 35 (46.05%) Kubernetes
1 35 (46.05%) Terraform
2 21 (27.63%) Ansible
3 18 (23.68%) Prometheus
4 17 (22.37%) Grafana
5 9 (11.84%) Argo
6 3 (3.95%) Kustomize
Vendors
1 3 (3.95%) Google
2 2 (2.63%) Black Duck
2 2 (2.63%) Coverity
3 1 (1.32%) Microsoft
3 1 (1.32%) Salesforce