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 5 November 2025.

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

6 months to
5 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 604 625 557
Rank change year-on-year +21 -68 +282
Permanent jobs requiring a Lead DevOps 60 114 173
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.12% 0.17% 0.33%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.13% 0.18% 0.34%
Number of salaries quoted 44 66 151
10th Percentile £68,300 £65,750 £70,000
25th Percentile £76,875 £66,500 £77,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £84,250 £72,500 £85,000
Median % change year-on-year +16.21% -14.71% -8.11%
75th Percentile £93,125 £87,500 £95,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £100,625 £117,236
UK excluding London median annual salary £83,000 £70,000 £82,500
% change year-on-year +18.57% -15.15% +2.08%

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 45,096 64,445 50,460
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 90.10% 95.05% 95.49%
Number of salaries quoted 27,937 36,459 39,152
10th Percentile £28,250 £31,250 £31,500
25th Percentile £35,000 £42,094 £42,750
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £52,500 £57,500 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% -4.17% -
75th Percentile £73,750 £75,000 £80,000
90th Percentile £92,500 £95,000 £97,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £46,000 £50,000 £52,500
% change year-on-year -8.00% -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 5 November 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 5 November 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 +66 58 £85,000 +17.24% 29
UK excluding London +40 38 £83,000 +18.57% 19
London +39 18 £92,500 -9.92% 10
Work from Home +47 17 £80,000 -5.88% 18
North of England -6 15 £80,000 +17.65% 4
South East +39 11 £84,250 -2.32% 7
Yorkshire -12 11 £74,000 +8.82%
West Midlands +56 10 £85,000 +31.22% 4
Midlands +53 10 £85,000 +25.93% 5
North East +11 4 £95,000 -5.00%
South West +39 1 £92,500 +27.59% 2
Scotland -3 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 5 November 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 60 (100.00%) DevOps
2 35 (58.33%) CI/CD
3 33 (55.00%) AWS
4 25 (41.67%) Kubernetes
4 25 (41.67%) Terraform
5 23 (38.33%) Azure
5 23 (38.33%) Infrastructure as Code
6 21 (35.00%) Agile
7 18 (30.00%) Docker
8 15 (25.00%) Security Cleared
9 13 (21.67%) Ansible
10 12 (20.00%) AI
10 12 (20.00%) GCP
11 11 (18.33%) Grafana
11 11 (18.33%) Observability
11 11 (18.33%) Site Reliability Engineering
12 10 (16.67%) GitLab
12 10 (16.67%) Prometheus
12 10 (16.67%) Python
12 10 (16.67%) SC Cleared
12 10 (16.67%) Windows
13 9 (15.00%) Containerisation
13 9 (15.00%) Linux
13 9 (15.00%) Problem-Solving
13 9 (15.00%) SDLC
14 8 (13.33%) Azure DevOps
14 8 (13.33%) Incident Response
14 8 (13.33%) Infrastructure Engineering
14 8 (13.33%) Machine Learning
14 8 (13.33%) Performance Optimisation

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 (1.67%) Apache Solr
1 1 (1.67%) nginx
1 1 (1.67%) WebLogic
Cloud Services
1 33 (55.00%) AWS
2 23 (38.33%) Azure
3 12 (20.00%) GCP
4 8 (13.33%) Azure DevOps
5 5 (8.33%) Amazon ECS
5 5 (8.33%) GitHub
5 5 (8.33%) GitHub Actions
6 4 (6.67%) Amazon EKS
6 4 (6.67%) Apigee
6 4 (6.67%) Kong
7 3 (5.00%) AWS CloudFormation
8 1 (1.67%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 1 (1.67%) Amazon GuardDuty
8 1 (1.67%) Amazon S3
8 1 (1.67%) AWS Control Tower
8 1 (1.67%) Azure AKS
8 1 (1.67%) Datadog
8 1 (1.67%) Pulumi
8 1 (1.67%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 4 (6.67%) Firewall
2 3 (5.00%) Network Security
3 2 (3.33%) DNS
4 1 (1.67%) HTTPS
4 1 (1.67%) IPsec
4 1 (1.67%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (6.67%) KDB
2 1 (1.67%) Couchbase
2 1 (1.67%) MySQL
2 1 (1.67%) NoSQL
Development Applications
1 10 (16.67%) GitLab
2 3 (5.00%) Jenkins
3 2 (3.33%) Git
3 2 (3.33%) Robot Framework
3 2 (3.33%) Selenium
3 2 (3.33%) Snyk
4 1 (1.67%) CircleCI
General
1 13 (21.67%) Finance
2 10 (16.67%) Banking
2 10 (16.67%) Inclusion and Diversity
3 9 (15.00%) Law
4 6 (10.00%) Social Skills
5 2 (3.33%) Analytical Skills
5 2 (3.33%) Investment Banking
5 2 (3.33%) Public Sector
6 1 (1.67%) Aviation
6 1 (1.67%) Corporate Banking
6 1 (1.67%) Financial Institution
6 1 (1.67%) Marketing
6 1 (1.67%) Organisational Skills
6 1 (1.67%) Private Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 4 (6.67%) OpenAPI
1 4 (6.67%) RESTful
1 4 (6.67%) Swagger
2 1 (1.67%) .NET
2 1 (1.67%) ARM Templates
2 1 (1.67%) Elastic Stack
2 1 (1.67%) LAMP
2 1 (1.67%) Middleware
2 1 (1.67%) OpenTelemetry
2 1 (1.67%) RabbitMQ
2 1 (1.67%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 16 (26.67%) Cloud Native
2 4 (6.67%) Data Centre
2 4 (6.67%) Equities
2 4 (6.67%) Management Information System
3 2 (3.33%) Product Ownership
4 1 (1.67%) Credit Risk
4 1 (1.67%) Distributed Systems
4 1 (1.67%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 10 (16.67%) Windows
2 9 (15.00%) Linux
3 6 (10.00%) Unix
4 1 (1.67%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 60 (100.00%) DevOps
2 35 (58.33%) CI/CD
3 23 (38.33%) Infrastructure as Code
4 21 (35.00%) Agile
5 12 (20.00%) AI
6 11 (18.33%) Observability
6 11 (18.33%) Site Reliability Engineering
7 9 (15.00%) Containerisation
7 9 (15.00%) Problem-Solving
7 9 (15.00%) SDLC
8 8 (13.33%) Incident Response
8 8 (13.33%) Infrastructure Engineering
8 8 (13.33%) Machine Learning
8 8 (13.33%) Performance Optimisation
8 8 (13.33%) Software Engineering
9 7 (11.67%) Line Management
10 5 (8.33%) Analytics
10 5 (8.33%) Computer Science
10 5 (8.33%) Mentoring
10 5 (8.33%) Microservices
Programming Languages
1 10 (16.67%) Python
2 6 (10.00%) Go
3 4 (6.67%) Lua
4 3 (5.00%) Bicep
5 2 (3.33%) Bash
5 2 (3.33%) Java
5 2 (3.33%) JavaScript
6 1 (1.67%) PHP
6 1 (1.67%) PowerShell
6 1 (1.67%) SQL
Qualifications
1 15 (25.00%) Security Cleared
2 10 (16.67%) SC Cleared
3 7 (11.67%) DV Cleared
4 2 (3.33%) Azure Certification
5 1 (1.67%) AWS Certification
5 1 (1.67%) Computer Science Degree
5 1 (1.67%) Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (1.67%) QA
System Software
1 18 (30.00%) Docker
Systems Management
1 25 (41.67%) Kubernetes
1 25 (41.67%) Terraform
2 13 (21.67%) Ansible
3 11 (18.33%) Grafana
4 10 (16.67%) Prometheus
5 1 (1.67%) Argo
5 1 (1.67%) Progress Chef
5 1 (1.67%) Puppet
Vendors
1 4 (6.67%) MKS
1 4 (6.67%) MuleSoft
2 3 (5.00%) Microsoft
3 2 (3.33%) Black Duck
3 2 (3.33%) Coverity
4 1 (1.67%) VMware