Lead DevOps Job Trends

Lead Development Operations
UK

The median Lead Development Operations salary in the UK is £82,500 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 1 December 2025.

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

6 months to
1 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 576 641 555
Rank change year-on-year +65 -86 +267
Permanent jobs requiring a Lead DevOps 73 108 153
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.13% 0.17% 0.30%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.15% 0.18% 0.32%
Number of salaries quoted 59 63 132
10th Percentile £63,500 - £70,000
25th Percentile £76,250 £66,500 £77,188
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £82,500 £75,000 £85,000
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% -11.76% -8.11%
75th Percentile £92,500 £89,375 £95,000
90th Percentile £97,000 £110,556 £117,236
UK excluding London median annual salary £80,000 £72,500 £81,750
% change year-on-year +10.34% -11.31% +2.19%

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 48,887 61,129 48,339
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 90.28% 94.26% 95.30%
Number of salaries quoted 30,843 33,997 37,695
10th Percentile £28,250 £32,500 £31,250
25th Percentile £35,750 £42,500 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £54,656 £57,500 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year -4.95% -4.17% -
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 1 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 1 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 +89 71 £82,500 +10.00% 18
UK excluding London +57 49 £80,000 +10.34% 14
Work from Home +84 23 £80,000 -5.88% 8
North of England +18 20 £80,000 +17.65% 3
London +49 19 £92,500 -14.03% 6
West Midlands +66 14 £82,500 +15.97% 1
Midlands +57 14 £82,500 +17.86% 2
South East +45 12 £83,500 -1.76% 4
Yorkshire -5 12 £80,000 +17.65%
North East +19 6 £95,000 -5.00%
South West +13 3 £70,000 -3.45% 5
North West +40 2 £85,000 -10.18% 3

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

For the 6 months to 1 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 73 (100.00%) DevOps
2 38 (52.05%) CI/CD
3 37 (50.68%) AWS
4 31 (42.47%) Infrastructure as Code
4 31 (42.47%) Kubernetes
5 28 (38.36%) Azure
5 28 (38.36%) Terraform
6 24 (32.88%) Agile
7 23 (31.51%) Docker
8 20 (27.40%) Security Cleared
9 16 (21.92%) Ansible
10 14 (19.18%) GCP
10 14 (19.18%) Observability
11 12 (16.44%) Grafana
11 12 (16.44%) Prometheus
11 12 (16.44%) Site Reliability Engineering
12 11 (15.07%) Azure DevOps
12 11 (15.07%) Containerisation
12 11 (15.07%) GitLab
12 11 (15.07%) Performance Optimisation
12 11 (15.07%) Python
12 11 (15.07%) SC Cleared
13 10 (13.70%) DV Cleared
13 10 (13.70%) Incident Response
13 10 (13.70%) Infrastructure Engineering
13 10 (13.70%) Line Management
13 10 (13.70%) Linux
14 9 (12.33%) AI
14 9 (12.33%) Windows
15 8 (10.96%) GitHub

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 (1.37%) Confluence
1 1 (1.37%) WebLogic
Cloud Services
1 37 (50.68%) AWS
2 28 (38.36%) Azure
3 14 (19.18%) GCP
4 11 (15.07%) Azure DevOps
5 8 (10.96%) GitHub
6 7 (9.59%) GitHub Actions
7 3 (4.11%) Amazon ECS
7 3 (4.11%) AWS CloudFormation
8 2 (2.74%) Amazon EKS
8 2 (2.74%) Amazon S3
8 2 (2.74%) Apigee
8 2 (2.74%) Kong
8 2 (2.74%) Pulumi
8 2 (2.74%) SaaS
9 1 (1.37%) Amazon GuardDuty
9 1 (1.37%) AWS Control Tower
9 1 (1.37%) AWS Lambda
9 1 (1.37%) Azure AKS
9 1 (1.37%) Cloudflare
9 1 (1.37%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 3 (4.11%) Firewall
2 2 (2.74%) Network Security
3 1 (1.37%) Broadband
3 1 (1.37%) DNS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 2 (2.74%) KDB
2 1 (1.37%) Amazon RDS
2 1 (1.37%) Metadata
2 1 (1.37%) NoSQL
2 1 (1.37%) RDBMS
2 1 (1.37%) Relational Database
Development Applications
1 11 (15.07%) GitLab
2 4 (5.48%) Git
2 4 (5.48%) Jenkins
3 3 (4.11%) Selenium
4 2 (2.74%) JIRA
4 2 (2.74%) Robot Framework
4 2 (2.74%) Snyk
5 1 (1.37%) Bitbucket
5 1 (1.37%) CircleCI
5 1 (1.37%) Jaeger
5 1 (1.37%) WebDriver
General
1 12 (16.44%) Finance
2 8 (10.96%) Banking
3 7 (9.59%) Social Skills
4 6 (8.22%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 5 (6.85%) Law
6 4 (5.48%) Analytical Skills
6 4 (5.48%) Investment Banking
7 3 (4.11%) Corporate Banking
7 3 (4.11%) Financial Institution
7 3 (4.11%) Private Banking
8 2 (2.74%) Public Sector
9 1 (1.37%) Aviation
9 1 (1.37%) Documentation Skills
9 1 (1.37%) Organisational Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (2.74%) ARM Templates
1 2 (2.74%) Elastic Stack
1 2 (2.74%) Middleware
1 2 (2.74%) OpenAPI
1 2 (2.74%) OpenTelemetry
1 2 (2.74%) RESTful
1 2 (2.74%) Swagger
2 1 (1.37%) .NET
2 1 (1.37%) LAMP
2 1 (1.37%) Lightning Web Components
2 1 (1.37%) REST
2 1 (1.37%) SOAP
2 1 (1.37%) Visualforce
2 1 (1.37%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 15 (20.55%) Cloud Native
2 3 (4.11%) Data Centre
2 3 (4.11%) Product Ownership
3 2 (2.74%) Equities
3 2 (2.74%) Management Information System
4 1 (1.37%) Analytical Mindset
4 1 (1.37%) Distributed Systems
4 1 (1.37%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 10 (13.70%) Linux
2 9 (12.33%) Windows
3 5 (6.85%) Unix
4 1 (1.37%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 73 (100.00%) DevOps
2 38 (52.05%) CI/CD
3 31 (42.47%) Infrastructure as Code
4 24 (32.88%) Agile
5 14 (19.18%) Observability
6 12 (16.44%) Site Reliability Engineering
7 11 (15.07%) Containerisation
7 11 (15.07%) Performance Optimisation
8 10 (13.70%) Incident Response
8 10 (13.70%) Infrastructure Engineering
8 10 (13.70%) Line Management
9 9 (12.33%) AI
10 8 (10.96%) Problem-Solving
11 7 (9.59%) Mentoring
12 6 (8.22%) Continuous Improvement
12 6 (8.22%) Microservices
12 6 (8.22%) SDLC
13 5 (6.85%) DevSecOps
13 5 (6.85%) Roadmaps
13 5 (6.85%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 11 (15.07%) Python
2 6 (8.22%) Go
3 5 (6.85%) JavaScript
4 4 (5.48%) Bash
5 3 (4.11%) Bicep
5 3 (4.11%) Java
6 2 (2.74%) Lua
7 1 (1.37%) Apex Code
7 1 (1.37%) PowerShell
7 1 (1.37%) SQL
Qualifications
1 20 (27.40%) Security Cleared
2 11 (15.07%) SC Cleared
3 10 (13.70%) DV Cleared
4 2 (2.74%) AWS Certification
4 2 (2.74%) Azure Certification
5 1 (1.37%) Computer Science Degree
5 1 (1.37%) Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (2.74%) QA
System Software
1 23 (31.51%) Docker
Systems Management
1 31 (42.47%) Kubernetes
2 28 (38.36%) Terraform
3 16 (21.92%) Ansible
4 12 (16.44%) Grafana
4 12 (16.44%) Prometheus
5 2 (2.74%) Argo
6 1 (1.37%) Kustomize
Vendors
1 3 (4.11%) Microsoft
2 2 (2.74%) Black Duck
2 2 (2.74%) Coverity
2 2 (2.74%) MKS
2 2 (2.74%) MuleSoft
3 1 (1.37%) Google
3 1 (1.37%) Salesforce
3 1 (1.37%) VMware