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 20 February 2026.

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

6 months to
20 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 579 610 640
Rank change year-on-year +31 +30 +118
Permanent jobs requiring a Lead DevOps 86 80 159
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.13% 0.16% 0.21%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.14% 0.18% 0.22%
Number of salaries quoted 75 45 149
10th Percentile £62,500 £66,500 £70,000
25th Percentile £76,250 £68,500 £76,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £80,000 £85,000 £85,000
Median % change year-on-year -5.88% - -8.11%
75th Percentile £90,000 £98,474 £100,000
90th Percentile £107,500 £120,250 £117,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £80,000 £72,500 £81,000
% change year-on-year +10.34% -10.49% +6.23%

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 62,593 44,758 70,993
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 91.28% 91.51% 94.81%
Number of salaries quoted 39,515 23,479 55,477
10th Percentile £29,000 £33,000 £28,500
25th Percentile £37,500 £45,000 £39,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £60,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +9.09% -8.33%
75th Percentile £75,000 £80,000 £73,750
90th Percentile £95,000 £100,000 £92,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £55,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year -9.09% +10.00% -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 20 February 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 20 February 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 +36 77 £81,250 -4.41% 29
UK excluding London -4 47 £80,000 +10.34% 20
Work from Home +69 38 £80,000 -7.25% 8
London +42 25 £100,000 -11.11% 13
North of England -7 18 £85,000 +23.19% 9
Midlands +11 15 £80,000 +23.51% 3
West Midlands +23 13 £80,000 +23.51% 3
South East -15 8 £75,000 -11.76% 6
Yorkshire -32 8 £80,000 +17.65% 2
North West -3 6 £85,000 -8.11% 7
South West -18 6 £80,000 +10.34%
North East - 4 £95,000 -
East Midlands - 2 £82,500 -

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

For the 6 months to 20 February 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 86 (100.00%) DevOps
2 42 (48.84%) CI/CD
3 36 (41.86%) Terraform
4 35 (40.70%) AWS
5 34 (39.53%) Infrastructure as Code
5 34 (39.53%) Kubernetes
6 30 (34.88%) Agile
6 30 (34.88%) Docker
7 28 (32.56%) Azure
8 20 (23.26%) Ansible
9 19 (22.09%) Python
10 17 (19.77%) Site Reliability Engineering
11 15 (17.44%) Mentoring
11 15 (17.44%) Observability
12 14 (16.28%) GitHub
12 14 (16.28%) Prometheus
13 13 (15.12%) Containerisation
13 13 (15.12%) Java
13 13 (15.12%) Performance Optimisation
13 13 (15.12%) Security Cleared
14 12 (13.95%) Go
14 12 (13.95%) Grafana
14 12 (13.95%) Line Management
14 12 (13.95%) Linux
15 11 (12.79%) Azure DevOps
15 11 (12.79%) GCP
15 11 (12.79%) GitHub Actions
15 11 (12.79%) GitLab
15 11 (12.79%) Incident Response
15 11 (12.79%) Infrastructure Engineering

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 (2.33%) Confluence
2 1 (1.16%) SAS
2 1 (1.16%) WebLogic
Applications
1 1 (1.16%) EngageOne
Business Applications
1 1 (1.16%) TIBCO iProcess
Cloud Services
1 35 (40.70%) AWS
2 28 (32.56%) Azure
3 14 (16.28%) GitHub
4 11 (12.79%) Azure DevOps
4 11 (12.79%) GCP
4 11 (12.79%) GitHub Actions
5 5 (5.81%) PaaS
5 5 (5.81%) Pulumi
5 5 (5.81%) SaaS
6 4 (4.65%) Amazon EKS
6 4 (4.65%) Amazon Kinesis
7 3 (3.49%) IaaS
8 2 (2.33%) AWS CloudFormation
8 2 (2.33%) AWS Control Tower
8 2 (2.33%) Azure Monitor
8 2 (2.33%) BrowserStack
9 1 (1.16%) AWS Lambda
9 1 (1.16%) Datadog
9 1 (1.16%) Salesforce Service Cloud
9 1 (1.16%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 4 (4.65%) Broadband
2 2 (2.33%) DSL
3 1 (1.16%) DNS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (4.65%) Flink
1 4 (4.65%) NoSQL
1 4 (4.65%) RDBMS
1 4 (4.65%) Relational Database
2 2 (2.33%) Metadata
3 1 (1.16%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 11 (12.79%) GitLab
2 5 (5.81%) Git
2 5 (5.81%) Selenium
3 4 (4.65%) Jaeger
4 3 (3.49%) Jenkins
4 3 (3.49%) JIRA
5 2 (2.33%) Robot Framework
5 2 (2.33%) Snyk
6 1 (1.16%) Bitbucket
6 1 (1.16%) CircleCI
6 1 (1.16%) WebDriver
General
1 15 (17.44%) Finance
2 9 (10.47%) Banking
3 7 (8.14%) Social Skills
4 5 (5.81%) Analytical Skills
4 5 (5.81%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 4 (4.65%) Front Office
5 4 (4.65%) Investment Banking
6 3 (3.49%) Corporate Banking
6 3 (3.49%) Financial Institution
6 3 (3.49%) Private Banking
6 3 (3.49%) Public Sector
7 1 (1.16%) Aviation
7 1 (1.16%) Documentation Skills
7 1 (1.16%) Health Technology
7 1 (1.16%) Law
7 1 (1.16%) Organisational Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 5 (5.81%) OpenTelemetry
2 4 (4.65%) ARM Templates
2 4 (4.65%) Elastic Stack
2 4 (4.65%) Kafka
2 4 (4.65%) React
3 3 (3.49%) .NET
4 2 (2.33%) Middleware
4 2 (2.33%) Node.js
4 2 (2.33%) Playwright
5 1 (1.16%) .NET Core
5 1 (1.16%) JSON
5 1 (1.16%) Lightning Web Components
5 1 (1.16%) REST
5 1 (1.16%) SOAP
5 1 (1.16%) Visualforce
Miscellaneous
1 10 (11.63%) Cloud Native
2 5 (5.81%) Product Ownership
3 3 (3.49%) Management Information System
4 2 (2.33%) Enterprise Storage
4 2 (2.33%) Hybrid Cloud
4 2 (2.33%) Social Media
5 1 (1.16%) Analytical Mindset
5 1 (1.16%) Distributed Systems
5 1 (1.16%) Greenfield Project
5 1 (1.16%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 12 (13.95%) Linux
2 8 (9.30%) Unix
3 2 (2.33%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 2 (2.33%) Windows
4 1 (1.16%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 86 (100.00%) DevOps
2 42 (48.84%) CI/CD
3 34 (39.53%) Infrastructure as Code
4 30 (34.88%) Agile
5 17 (19.77%) Site Reliability Engineering
6 15 (17.44%) Mentoring
6 15 (17.44%) Observability
7 13 (15.12%) Containerisation
7 13 (15.12%) Performance Optimisation
8 12 (13.95%) Line Management
9 11 (12.79%) Incident Response
9 11 (12.79%) Infrastructure Engineering
10 8 (9.30%) DevSecOps
10 8 (9.30%) Roadmaps
11 7 (8.14%) Continuous Integration
11 7 (8.14%) Incident Management
11 7 (8.14%) Scrum
12 6 (6.98%) Continuous Improvement
12 6 (6.98%) Technical Leadership
12 6 (6.98%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 19 (22.09%) Python
2 13 (15.12%) Java
3 12 (13.95%) Go
4 9 (10.47%) JavaScript
5 6 (6.98%) Bash
6 5 (5.81%) Bicep
7 4 (4.65%) SQL
8 2 (2.33%) C#
8 2 (2.33%) TypeScript
9 1 (1.16%) Apex Code
Qualifications
1 13 (15.12%) Security Cleared
2 6 (6.98%) AWS Certification
3 5 (5.81%) DV Cleared
3 5 (5.81%) SC Cleared
4 2 (2.33%) Azure Certification
5 1 (1.16%) Computer Science Degree
5 1 (1.16%) Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (2.33%) QA
2 1 (1.16%) Data Quality
2 1 (1.16%) NIST
System Software
1 30 (34.88%) Docker
2 2 (2.33%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 36 (41.86%) Terraform
2 34 (39.53%) Kubernetes
3 20 (23.26%) Ansible
4 14 (16.28%) Prometheus
5 12 (13.95%) Grafana
6 10 (11.63%) Argo
7 4 (4.65%) Kustomize
8 2 (2.33%) Packer
9 1 (1.16%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 4 (4.65%) Google
2 2 (2.33%) Black Duck
2 2 (2.33%) Coverity
2 2 (2.33%) Microsoft
2 2 (2.33%) Red Hat
2 2 (2.33%) VMware
3 1 (1.16%) Salesforce
3 1 (1.16%) ServiceNow
3 1 (1.16%) TIBCO