Lead DevOps Job Trends

Lead Development Operations
UK

The median Lead Development Operations salary in the UK is £83,000 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 12 March 2026.

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

6 months to
12 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 583 591 670
Rank change year-on-year +8 +79 +101
Permanent jobs requiring a Lead DevOps 99 65 153
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.13% 0.15% 0.18%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.15% 0.16% 0.19%
Number of salaries quoted 86 44 144
10th Percentile £62,500 £66,500 £70,000
25th Percentile £75,625 £68,750 £75,625
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £83,000 £85,000 £85,000
Median % change year-on-year -2.35% - -7.61%
75th Percentile £95,000 £98,855 £98,125
90th Percentile £100,000 £122,250 £117,236
UK excluding London median annual salary £80,000 £75,000 £82,500
% change year-on-year +6.67% -9.09% +10.00%

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 67,520 39,640 79,197
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 91.81% 90.72% 94.60%
Number of salaries quoted 42,919 22,979 60,984
10th Percentile £30,000 £32,000 £28,500
25th Percentile £38,750 £43,750 £38,750
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 £72,500
90th Percentile £95,000 £100,000 £92,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £54,983 £50,000
% change year-on-year -9.06% +9.97% -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 12 March 2026.

Salary histogram for Lead DevOps in the UK

Lead DevOps
Top 15 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 12 March 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 +11 89 £83,637 -1.60% 25
UK excluding London -11 56 £80,000 +6.67% 20
Work from Home +33 39 £80,000 -7.25% 11
London +34 29 £100,000 -11.11% 9
Midlands 0 20 £85,000 +31.22% 3
North of England -30 18 £85,000 +4.62% 7
West Midlands +17 15 £80,000 +23.51% 1
South East -21 8 £75,000 -11.76% 4
North West -10 7 £85,000 -8.11% 5
Yorkshire -45 7 £80,000 +17.65% 2
South West -29 6 £80,000 +10.34% 2
East Midlands - 5 £100,000 - 2
North East - 4 £95,000 -
East of England - 3 £70,000 - 3
Scotland -13 1 £55,000 -38.89% 1

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

For the 6 months to 12 March 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 99 (100.00%) DevOps
2 46 (46.46%) CI/CD
3 39 (39.39%) Terraform
4 38 (38.38%) Infrastructure as Code
5 36 (36.36%) Kubernetes
6 35 (35.35%) AWS
7 32 (32.32%) Agile
8 31 (31.31%) Azure
9 29 (29.29%) Docker
10 21 (21.21%) Ansible
11 20 (20.20%) Site Reliability Engineering
12 19 (19.19%) Observability
13 18 (18.18%) Python
14 15 (15.15%) Mentoring
15 14 (14.14%) Incident Response
15 14 (14.14%) Linux
15 14 (14.14%) Performance Optimisation
15 14 (14.14%) Prometheus
15 14 (14.14%) Security Cleared
16 13 (13.13%) Azure DevOps
16 13 (13.13%) GitHub
16 13 (13.13%) Java
17 12 (12.12%) GCP
17 12 (12.12%) Go
17 12 (12.12%) Grafana
17 12 (12.12%) Line Management
18 11 (11.11%) Containerisation
18 11 (11.11%) GitLab
18 11 (11.11%) Infrastructure Engineering
19 10 (10.10%) Argo

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 3 (3.03%) Confluence
2 1 (1.01%) SAS
2 1 (1.01%) WebLogic
Applications
1 1 (1.01%) EngageOne
Business Applications
1 1 (1.01%) TIBCO iProcess
Cloud Services
1 35 (35.35%) AWS
2 31 (31.31%) Azure
3 13 (13.13%) Azure DevOps
3 13 (13.13%) GitHub
4 12 (12.12%) GCP
5 10 (10.10%) GitHub Actions
6 5 (5.05%) PaaS
6 5 (5.05%) SaaS
7 4 (4.04%) Amazon EKS
7 4 (4.04%) Amazon Kinesis
7 4 (4.04%) Pulumi
8 3 (3.03%) IaaS
9 2 (2.02%) AWS CloudFormation
9 2 (2.02%) AWS Control Tower
9 2 (2.02%) Azure AKS
9 2 (2.02%) Azure Monitor
9 2 (2.02%) BrowserStack
10 1 (1.01%) Amazon ECS
10 1 (1.01%) AWS CodePipeline
10 1 (1.01%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 4 (4.04%) Broadband
2 2 (2.02%) DSL
3 1 (1.01%) DNS
3 1 (1.01%) Firewall
3 1 (1.01%) LAN
3 1 (1.01%) TCP/IP
3 1 (1.01%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (4.04%) Flink
1 4 (4.04%) NoSQL
1 4 (4.04%) RDBMS
1 4 (4.04%) Relational Database
2 2 (2.02%) Metadata
3 1 (1.01%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 11 (11.11%) GitLab
2 5 (5.05%) Git
2 5 (5.05%) JIRA
2 5 (5.05%) Selenium
3 4 (4.04%) Jaeger
4 3 (3.03%) Jenkins
5 2 (2.02%) Robot Framework
5 2 (2.02%) Snyk
6 1 (1.01%) Bitbucket
6 1 (1.01%) WebDriver
General
1 16 (16.16%) Finance
2 9 (9.09%) Banking
3 7 (7.07%) Social Skills
4 6 (6.06%) Analytical Skills
5 5 (5.05%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 4 (4.04%) Front Office
6 4 (4.04%) Investment Banking
7 3 (3.03%) Corporate Banking
7 3 (3.03%) Financial Institution
7 3 (3.03%) Private Banking
7 3 (3.03%) Public Sector
8 1 (1.01%) Documentation Skills
8 1 (1.01%) Health Technology
8 1 (1.01%) Law
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 5 (5.05%) OpenTelemetry
2 4 (4.04%) ARM Templates
2 4 (4.04%) Elastic Stack
2 4 (4.04%) Kafka
2 4 (4.04%) React
3 3 (3.03%) .NET
4 2 (2.02%) Middleware
4 2 (2.02%) Node.js
4 2 (2.02%) Playwright
5 1 (1.01%) .NET Core
5 1 (1.01%) JSON
5 1 (1.01%) Lightning Web Components
5 1 (1.01%) REST
5 1 (1.01%) SOAP
5 1 (1.01%) Visualforce
Miscellaneous
1 10 (10.10%) Cloud Native
2 6 (6.06%) Product Ownership
3 3 (3.03%) Enterprise Storage
3 3 (3.03%) Management Information System
4 2 (2.02%) Hybrid Cloud
4 2 (2.02%) Social Media
5 1 (1.01%) Analytical Mindset
5 1 (1.01%) CMDB
5 1 (1.01%) Greenfield Project
5 1 (1.01%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 14 (14.14%) Linux
2 8 (8.08%) Unix
3 4 (4.04%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 2 (2.02%) Windows
5 1 (1.01%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 99 (100.00%) DevOps
2 46 (46.46%) CI/CD
3 38 (38.38%) Infrastructure as Code
4 32 (32.32%) Agile
5 20 (20.20%) Site Reliability Engineering
6 19 (19.19%) Observability
7 15 (15.15%) Mentoring
8 14 (14.14%) Incident Response
8 14 (14.14%) Performance Optimisation
9 12 (12.12%) Line Management
10 11 (11.11%) Containerisation
10 11 (11.11%) Infrastructure Engineering
11 8 (8.08%) Incident Management
11 8 (8.08%) Roadmaps
12 7 (7.07%) Continuous Improvement
12 7 (7.07%) Continuous Integration
12 7 (7.07%) Disaster Recovery
12 7 (7.07%) Platform Engineering
12 7 (7.07%) Scrum
12 7 (7.07%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 18 (18.18%) Python
2 13 (13.13%) Java
3 12 (12.12%) Go
4 9 (9.09%) JavaScript
5 6 (6.06%) Bash
6 4 (4.04%) Bicep
6 4 (4.04%) SQL
7 2 (2.02%) C#
7 2 (2.02%) TypeScript
8 1 (1.01%) Apex Code
8 1 (1.01%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 14 (14.14%) Security Cleared
2 6 (6.06%) AWS Certification
2 6 (6.06%) SC Cleared
3 5 (5.05%) DV Cleared
4 2 (2.02%) Azure Certification
5 1 (1.01%) Computer Science Degree
5 1 (1.01%) Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (1.01%) Data Quality
1 1 (1.01%) NIST
1 1 (1.01%) QA
System Software
1 29 (29.29%) Docker
2 2 (2.02%) VMware Infrastructure
3 1 (1.01%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 39 (39.39%) Terraform
2 36 (36.36%) Kubernetes
3 21 (21.21%) Ansible
4 14 (14.14%) Prometheus
5 12 (12.12%) Grafana
6 10 (10.10%) Argo
7 4 (4.04%) Kustomize
8 2 (2.02%) Packer
9 1 (1.01%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 5 (5.05%) Google
2 4 (4.04%) Red Hat
2 4 (4.04%) VMware
3 3 (3.03%) Microsoft
4 2 (2.02%) Black Duck
4 2 (2.02%) Coverity
4 2 (2.02%) ServiceNow
5 1 (1.01%) Pega
5 1 (1.01%) Pure Storage
5 1 (1.01%) Salesforce
5 1 (1.01%) TIBCO