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 18 May 2026.

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

6 months to
18 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 598 616 741
Rank change year-on-year +18 +125 -38
Permanent jobs requiring a Lead DevOps 129 39 147
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.14% 0.088% 0.15%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.15% 0.098% 0.16%
Number of salaries quoted 114 29 131
10th Percentile £67,500 £75,000 £66,500
25th Percentile £77,500 £80,000 £72,611
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 £106,250 £95,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £120,000 £115,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £85,000 £85,000 £82,500
% change year-on-year - +3.03% +3.13%

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 85,613 39,653 91,884
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 93.33% 89.71% 94.62%
Number of salaries quoted 56,627 23,002 67,400
10th Percentile £30,000 £30,000 £28,500
25th Percentile £40,000 £41,250 £38,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £57,500 £52,500
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% +9.52% -12.50%
75th Percentile £75,000 £77,500 £71,000
90th Percentile £95,000 £100,000 £90,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £52,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year -3.85% +4.00% -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 18 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 18 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 +19 114 £90,000 +2.86% 10
UK excluding London +11 75 £85,000 - 8
Work from Home +89 58 £90,000 +5.88% 4
London +5 37 £100,000 -11.11% 4
Midlands - 31 £90,000 -
North of England -22 28 £90,000 +5.88% 2
East Midlands - 18 £85,000 -
West Midlands - 13 £90,000 -
North West +14 12 £90,000 +2.86% 2
Yorkshire -34 12 £86,887 +19.43%
South West -55 6 £80,000 -5.88% 1
South East -14 4 £80,000 -5.88% 4
North East - 4 £90,000 -
East of England - 3 £70,000 - 1
Scotland -4 2 £55,000 -35.29%
Wales - 1 £74,000 -

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

For the 6 months to 18 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.

1 129 (100.00%) DevOps
2 47 (36.43%) Azure
3 45 (34.88%) CI/CD
4 40 (31.01%) Terraform
5 38 (29.46%) Infrastructure as Code
6 35 (27.13%) Kubernetes
7 29 (22.48%) AWS
8 27 (20.93%) Agile
9 24 (18.60%) Docker
10 21 (16.28%) Azure DevOps
11 19 (14.73%) Observability
11 19 (14.73%) Python
12 18 (13.95%) Mentoring
13 16 (12.40%) Site Reliability Engineering
14 15 (11.63%) Containerisation
15 13 (10.08%) Ansible
15 13 (10.08%) GitHub
15 13 (10.08%) Incident Response
16 12 (9.30%) Java
16 12 (9.30%) Platform Engineering
17 11 (8.53%) GCP
17 11 (8.53%) GitHub Actions
17 11 (8.53%) Incident Management
17 11 (8.53%) Line Management
17 11 (8.53%) Linux
17 11 (8.53%) Performance Optimisation
18 10 (7.75%) GitLab
18 10 (7.75%) Security Cleared
18 10 (7.75%) Test Automation
19 9 (6.98%) Continuous Improvement

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 (1.55%) Confluence
2 1 (0.78%) SAS
2 1 (0.78%) SharePoint
Applications
1 1 (0.78%) EngageOne
Business Applications
1 1 (0.78%) Teamcenter
1 1 (0.78%) TIBCO iProcess
Cloud Services
1 47 (36.43%) Azure
2 29 (22.48%) AWS
3 21 (16.28%) Azure DevOps
4 13 (10.08%) GitHub
5 11 (8.53%) GCP
5 11 (8.53%) GitHub Actions
6 8 (6.20%) SaaS
7 7 (5.43%) PaaS
8 5 (3.88%) IaaS
9 4 (3.10%) Amazon EKS
9 4 (3.10%) Amazon Kinesis
10 3 (2.33%) Azure Monitor
10 3 (2.33%) Pulumi
11 2 (1.55%) AWS Control Tower
11 2 (1.55%) Azure AKS
11 2 (1.55%) BrowserStack
12 1 (0.78%) Azure Functions
12 1 (0.78%) Azure Logic Apps
12 1 (0.78%) Salesforce Service Cloud
12 1 (0.78%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 3 (2.33%) Broadband
2 2 (1.55%) DSL
3 1 (0.78%) DMARC
3 1 (0.78%) Firewall
3 1 (0.78%) LAN
3 1 (0.78%) TCP/IP
3 1 (0.78%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (3.10%) Flink
2 3 (2.33%) NoSQL
2 3 (2.33%) RDBMS
2 3 (2.33%) Relational Database
3 2 (1.55%) Metadata
4 1 (0.78%) MariaDB
4 1 (0.78%) MySQL
4 1 (0.78%) PostgreSQL
Development Applications
1 10 (7.75%) GitLab
2 8 (6.20%) Git
3 7 (5.43%) Jenkins
4 4 (3.10%) JIRA
5 3 (2.33%) Jaeger
5 3 (2.33%) Selenium
6 1 (0.78%) Bitbucket
6 1 (0.78%) WebDriver
General
1 13 (10.08%) Finance
2 12 (9.30%) Retail
3 9 (6.98%) Public Sector
4 7 (5.43%) Social Skills
5 6 (4.65%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 5 (3.88%) Banking
7 4 (3.10%) Front Office
8 3 (2.33%) Analytical Skills
9 2 (1.55%) Games
10 1 (0.78%) Documentation Skills
10 1 (0.78%) Health Technology
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 8 (6.20%) .NET
1 8 (6.20%) React
2 7 (5.43%) Node.js
3 4 (3.10%) Kafka
4 3 (2.33%) ARM Templates
4 3 (2.33%) Elastic Stack
4 3 (2.33%) OpenTelemetry
5 2 (1.55%) Playwright
6 1 (0.78%) .NET Core
6 1 (0.78%) CSS
6 1 (0.78%) HTML
6 1 (0.78%) JSON
6 1 (0.78%) Lightning Web Components
6 1 (0.78%) Middleware
6 1 (0.78%) OAuth2
6 1 (0.78%) REST
6 1 (0.78%) SOAP
6 1 (0.78%) Spring
6 1 (0.78%) Spring Boot
6 1 (0.78%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 8 (6.20%) Cloud Native
2 4 (3.10%) Product Ownership
3 3 (2.33%) Enterprise Storage
3 3 (2.33%) Management Information System
4 2 (1.55%) Hybrid Cloud
4 2 (1.55%) Social Media
5 1 (0.78%) Analytical Mindset
5 1 (0.78%) CMDB
5 1 (0.78%) PKI
5 1 (0.78%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 11 (8.53%) Linux
2 6 (4.65%) Unix
3 5 (3.88%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 1 (0.78%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 129 (100.00%) DevOps
2 45 (34.88%) CI/CD
3 38 (29.46%) Infrastructure as Code
4 27 (20.93%) Agile
5 19 (14.73%) Observability
6 18 (13.95%) Mentoring
7 16 (12.40%) Site Reliability Engineering
8 15 (11.63%) Containerisation
9 13 (10.08%) Incident Response
10 12 (9.30%) Platform Engineering
11 11 (8.53%) Incident Management
11 11 (8.53%) Line Management
11 11 (8.53%) Performance Optimisation
12 10 (7.75%) Test Automation
13 9 (6.98%) Continuous Improvement
13 9 (6.98%) Infrastructure Engineering
14 8 (6.20%) Technical Leadership
15 7 (5.43%) Coaching
15 7 (5.43%) DevSecOps
15 7 (5.43%) E-Commerce
Programming Languages
1 19 (14.73%) Python
2 12 (9.30%) Java
3 9 (6.98%) Go
4 8 (6.20%) Bash
5 7 (5.43%) JavaScript
6 4 (3.10%) Bicep
7 3 (2.33%) C#
7 3 (2.33%) PowerShell
7 3 (2.33%) SQL
8 2 (1.55%) TypeScript
9 1 (0.78%) Apex Code
Qualifications
1 10 (7.75%) Security Cleared
2 9 (6.98%) SC Cleared
3 4 (3.10%) AWS Certification
4 1 (0.78%) Azure Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (1.55%) QA
2 1 (0.78%) Data Quality
2 1 (0.78%) NIST
System Software
1 24 (18.60%) Docker
2 2 (1.55%) VMware Infrastructure
3 1 (0.78%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (0.78%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 40 (31.01%) Terraform
2 35 (27.13%) Kubernetes
3 13 (10.08%) Ansible
4 9 (6.98%) Prometheus
5 8 (6.20%) Argo
5 8 (6.20%) Grafana
6 3 (2.33%) Kustomize
6 3 (2.33%) Packer
7 1 (0.78%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 6 (4.65%) Google
2 5 (3.88%) Red Hat
3 4 (3.10%) VMware
4 2 (1.55%) Microsoft
4 2 (1.55%) Pega
4 2 (1.55%) ServiceNow
5 1 (0.78%) Dynatrace
5 1 (0.78%) Pure Storage
5 1 (0.78%) Salesforce
5 1 (0.78%) SendGrid
5 1 (0.78%) TIBCO