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 7 December 2025.

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

6 months to
7 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 580 638 563
Rank change year-on-year +58 -75 +254
Permanent jobs requiring a Lead DevOps 74 104 148
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.13% 0.17% 0.29%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.15% 0.18% 0.31%
Number of salaries quoted 62 61 127
10th Percentile £66,850 - £70,000
25th Percentile £77,500 £66,500 £76,875
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £84,250 £74,000 £85,000
Median % change year-on-year +13.85% -12.94% -8.11%
75th Percentile £92,500 £90,000 £95,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £110,556 £118,842
UK excluding London median annual salary £80,000 £72,500 £80,000
% change year-on-year +10.34% -9.38% +1.91%

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 50,704 58,391 48,070
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 89.90% 94.00% 95.24%
Number of salaries quoted 31,404 32,367 37,457
10th Percentile £28,250 £32,500 £31,250
25th Percentile £36,250 £42,500 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £58,000 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year -5.17% -3.33% -
75th Percentile £75,000 £77,500 £80,000
90th Percentile £92,500 £95,000 £97,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £47,500 £52,500 £52,500
% change year-on-year -9.52% - -

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 7 December 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 7 December 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 +80 71 £83,500 +12.84% 63
UK excluding London +71 49 £80,000 +10.34% 60
Work from Home +81 26 £80,000 -5.88% 12
North of England +21 19 £80,000 +17.65% 12
London +60 18 £95,000 -11.71% 11
West Midlands +45 14 £82,500 +15.97% 7
Midlands +43 14 £82,500 +26.92% 13
South East +42 12 £83,500 -1.76% 17
Yorkshire -16 11 £80,000 +17.65% 4
North East +14 6 £95,000 -5.00% 1
South West +19 4 £75,000 +3.45% 8
North West +39 2 £85,000 -10.18% 7

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

For the 6 months to 7 December 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 38 (51.35%) CI/CD
3 37 (50.00%) AWS
4 33 (44.59%) Kubernetes
5 31 (41.89%) Infrastructure as Code
6 29 (39.19%) Terraform
7 28 (37.84%) Azure
8 25 (33.78%) Agile
8 25 (33.78%) Docker
9 19 (25.68%) Security Cleared
10 16 (21.62%) Ansible
11 15 (20.27%) GCP
11 15 (20.27%) Site Reliability Engineering
12 14 (18.92%) Observability
13 13 (17.57%) Prometheus
14 12 (16.22%) GitLab
14 12 (16.22%) Grafana
14 12 (16.22%) Performance Optimisation
15 11 (14.86%) Containerisation
15 11 (14.86%) Incident Response
15 11 (14.86%) Infrastructure Engineering
15 11 (14.86%) Line Management
15 11 (14.86%) Python
16 10 (13.51%) Azure DevOps
16 10 (13.51%) DV Cleared
16 10 (13.51%) GitHub
16 10 (13.51%) SC Cleared
17 9 (12.16%) GitHub Actions
17 9 (12.16%) Linux
18 8 (10.81%) Windows

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%) Confluence
1 1 (1.35%) WebLogic
Cloud Services
1 37 (50.00%) AWS
2 28 (37.84%) Azure
3 15 (20.27%) GCP
4 10 (13.51%) Azure DevOps
4 10 (13.51%) GitHub
5 9 (12.16%) GitHub Actions
6 3 (4.05%) Amazon EKS
7 2 (2.70%) Amazon ECS
7 2 (2.70%) Amazon Kinesis
7 2 (2.70%) Amazon S3
7 2 (2.70%) AWS CloudFormation
7 2 (2.70%) Pulumi
7 2 (2.70%) SaaS
8 1 (1.35%) Amazon EC2
8 1 (1.35%) Apigee
8 1 (1.35%) Datadog
8 1 (1.35%) IaaS
8 1 (1.35%) PaaS
8 1 (1.35%) Salesforce Commerce Cloud
8 1 (1.35%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 1 (1.35%) Broadband
1 1 (1.35%) DNS
1 1 (1.35%) Firewall
1 1 (1.35%) Network Security
Database & Business Intelligence
1 2 (2.70%) Flink
2 1 (1.35%) Amazon RDS
2 1 (1.35%) KDB
2 1 (1.35%) Metadata
2 1 (1.35%) NoSQL
2 1 (1.35%) RDBMS
2 1 (1.35%) Relational Database
Development Applications
1 12 (16.22%) GitLab
2 4 (5.41%) Git
2 4 (5.41%) Jenkins
3 3 (4.05%) Selenium
4 2 (2.70%) JIRA
4 2 (2.70%) Robot Framework
4 2 (2.70%) Snyk
5 1 (1.35%) Bitbucket
5 1 (1.35%) CircleCI
5 1 (1.35%) Jaeger
5 1 (1.35%) WebDriver
General
1 12 (16.22%) Finance
2 8 (10.81%) Banking
3 6 (8.11%) Social Skills
4 4 (5.41%) Analytical Skills
4 4 (5.41%) Inclusion and Diversity
4 4 (5.41%) Investment Banking
5 3 (4.05%) Corporate Banking
5 3 (4.05%) Financial Institution
5 3 (4.05%) Law
5 3 (4.05%) Private Banking
6 2 (2.70%) Front Office
6 2 (2.70%) Public Sector
7 1 (1.35%) Aviation
7 1 (1.35%) Documentation Skills
7 1 (1.35%) Organisational Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (2.70%) ARM Templates
1 2 (2.70%) Kafka
1 2 (2.70%) Middleware
1 2 (2.70%) OpenTelemetry
1 2 (2.70%) React
2 1 (1.35%) .NET
2 1 (1.35%) Elastic Stack
2 1 (1.35%) LAMP
2 1 (1.35%) Lightning Web Components
2 1 (1.35%) OpenAPI
2 1 (1.35%) REST
2 1 (1.35%) RESTful
2 1 (1.35%) SOAP
2 1 (1.35%) Swagger
2 1 (1.35%) Visualforce
2 1 (1.35%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 14 (18.92%) Cloud Native
2 3 (4.05%) Product Ownership
3 2 (2.70%) Data Centre
4 1 (1.35%) Analytical Mindset
4 1 (1.35%) Distributed Systems
4 1 (1.35%) Equities
4 1 (1.35%) Greenfield Project
4 1 (1.35%) Management Information System
Operating Systems
1 9 (12.16%) Linux
2 8 (10.81%) Windows
3 3 (4.05%) Unix
4 1 (1.35%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 74 (100.00%) DevOps
2 38 (51.35%) CI/CD
3 31 (41.89%) Infrastructure as Code
4 25 (33.78%) Agile
5 15 (20.27%) Site Reliability Engineering
6 14 (18.92%) Observability
7 12 (16.22%) Performance Optimisation
8 11 (14.86%) Containerisation
8 11 (14.86%) Incident Response
8 11 (14.86%) Infrastructure Engineering
8 11 (14.86%) Line Management
9 7 (9.46%) AI
9 7 (9.46%) Mentoring
10 6 (8.11%) Continuous Improvement
10 6 (8.11%) Microservices
10 6 (8.11%) Problem-Solving
11 5 (6.76%) DevSecOps
11 5 (6.76%) Roadmaps
11 5 (6.76%) Scrum
12 4 (5.41%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 11 (14.86%) Python
2 6 (8.11%) Go
3 5 (6.76%) Java
4 4 (5.41%) JavaScript
5 3 (4.05%) Bash
5 3 (4.05%) Bicep
6 1 (1.35%) Apex Code
6 1 (1.35%) Lua
6 1 (1.35%) PowerShell
6 1 (1.35%) SQL
Qualifications
1 19 (25.68%) Security Cleared
2 10 (13.51%) DV Cleared
2 10 (13.51%) SC Cleared
3 2 (2.70%) AWS Certification
3 2 (2.70%) Azure Certification
4 1 (1.35%) Computer Science Degree
4 1 (1.35%) Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (2.70%) QA
System Software
1 25 (33.78%) Docker
Systems Management
1 33 (44.59%) Kubernetes
2 29 (39.19%) Terraform
3 16 (21.62%) Ansible
4 13 (17.57%) Prometheus
5 12 (16.22%) Grafana
6 4 (5.41%) Argo
7 1 (1.35%) Kustomize
Vendors
1 2 (2.70%) Black Duck
1 2 (2.70%) Coverity
1 2 (2.70%) Microsoft
2 1 (1.35%) Google
2 1 (1.35%) MKS
2 1 (1.35%) MuleSoft
2 1 (1.35%) Salesforce
2 1 (1.35%) VMware