Lead DevOps Job Trends

Lead Development Operations
UK

The median Lead Development Operations salary in the UK is £83,637 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 20 March 2026.

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

6 months to
20 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 584 590 680
Rank change year-on-year +6 +90 +89
Permanent jobs requiring a Lead DevOps 106 64 147
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.14% 0.15% 0.17%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.15% 0.17% 0.18%
Number of salaries quoted 92 45 138
10th Percentile £62,500 £66,500 £70,000
25th Percentile £75,000 £68,750 £74,375
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £83,637 £85,000 £82,500
Median % change year-on-year -1.60% +3.03% -10.57%
75th Percentile £95,000 £100,000 £97,188
90th Percentile £100,000 £122,250 £115,671
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 69,320 38,229 80,901
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 91.97% 90.36% 94.62%
Number of salaries quoted 44,176 23,016 61,754
10th Percentile £30,000 £31,250 £28,500
25th Percentile £39,000 £43,419 £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 £91,934
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £54,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year -7.41% +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 20 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 20 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 +5 94 £85,000 - 23
UK excluding London -11 59 £80,000 +6.67% 18
Work from Home +42 42 £80,000 -7.25% 10
London +10 32 £100,000 -11.11% 7
Midlands -7 22 £85,000 +31.22% 4
North of England -37 18 £85,000 +4.62% 6
West Midlands +19 16 £82,500 +27.36% 1
South East -23 8 £75,000 -11.76% 3
North West -18 7 £85,000 -8.11% 5
Yorkshire -43 7 £80,000 +17.65% 1
South West -34 6 £80,000 +10.34% 1
East Midlands - 6 £100,000 - 3
North East - 4 £95,000 -
East of England - 3 £70,000 - 4
Scotland -19 2 £55,000 -38.89%

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

For the 6 months to 20 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.

1 106 (100.00%) DevOps
2 48 (45.28%) CI/CD
3 41 (38.68%) Terraform
4 40 (37.74%) Infrastructure as Code
5 39 (36.79%) Kubernetes
6 37 (34.91%) AWS
7 33 (31.13%) Agile
7 33 (31.13%) Azure
8 30 (28.30%) Docker
9 21 (19.81%) Ansible
9 21 (19.81%) Observability
9 21 (19.81%) Site Reliability Engineering
10 19 (17.92%) Python
11 16 (15.09%) Mentoring
12 15 (14.15%) Performance Optimisation
13 14 (13.21%) Azure DevOps
13 14 (13.21%) GCP
13 14 (13.21%) Incident Response
13 14 (13.21%) Linux
13 14 (13.21%) Prometheus
13 14 (13.21%) Security Cleared
14 13 (12.26%) GitHub
14 13 (12.26%) Java
15 12 (11.32%) Containerisation
15 12 (11.32%) Go
15 12 (11.32%) Grafana
15 12 (11.32%) Line Management
16 11 (10.38%) GitLab
16 11 (10.38%) Infrastructure Engineering
17 10 (9.43%) 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 (2.83%) Confluence
2 1 (0.94%) SAS
2 1 (0.94%) WebLogic
Applications
1 1 (0.94%) EngageOne
Business Applications
1 1 (0.94%) TIBCO iProcess
Cloud Services
1 37 (34.91%) AWS
2 33 (31.13%) Azure
3 14 (13.21%) Azure DevOps
3 14 (13.21%) GCP
4 13 (12.26%) GitHub
5 10 (9.43%) GitHub Actions
6 5 (4.72%) PaaS
6 5 (4.72%) SaaS
7 4 (3.77%) Amazon EKS
7 4 (3.77%) Amazon Kinesis
7 4 (3.77%) Pulumi
8 3 (2.83%) IaaS
9 2 (1.89%) AWS CloudFormation
9 2 (1.89%) AWS Control Tower
9 2 (1.89%) Azure AKS
9 2 (1.89%) Azure Monitor
9 2 (1.89%) BrowserStack
10 1 (0.94%) Amazon ECS
10 1 (0.94%) Salesforce Service Cloud
10 1 (0.94%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 4 (3.77%) Broadband
2 2 (1.89%) DSL
3 1 (0.94%) DNS
3 1 (0.94%) Firewall
3 1 (0.94%) LAN
3 1 (0.94%) TCP/IP
3 1 (0.94%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (3.77%) Flink
1 4 (3.77%) NoSQL
1 4 (3.77%) RDBMS
1 4 (3.77%) Relational Database
2 2 (1.89%) Metadata
3 1 (0.94%) Amazon RDS
3 1 (0.94%) MariaDB
3 1 (0.94%) MySQL
3 1 (0.94%) PostgreSQL
Development Applications
1 11 (10.38%) GitLab
2 6 (5.66%) Git
3 5 (4.72%) JIRA
3 5 (4.72%) Selenium
4 4 (3.77%) Jaeger
4 4 (3.77%) Jenkins
5 2 (1.89%) Robot Framework
5 2 (1.89%) Snyk
6 1 (0.94%) Bitbucket
6 1 (0.94%) WebDriver
General
1 16 (15.09%) Finance
2 9 (8.49%) Banking
3 7 (6.60%) Social Skills
4 6 (5.66%) Analytical Skills
4 6 (5.66%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 4 (3.77%) Front Office
5 4 (3.77%) Investment Banking
6 3 (2.83%) Corporate Banking
6 3 (2.83%) Financial Institution
6 3 (2.83%) Private Banking
6 3 (2.83%) Public Sector
7 2 (1.89%) Retail
8 1 (0.94%) Documentation Skills
8 1 (0.94%) Health Technology
8 1 (0.94%) Law
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 5 (4.72%) ARM Templates
1 5 (4.72%) OpenTelemetry
2 4 (3.77%) Elastic Stack
2 4 (3.77%) Kafka
2 4 (3.77%) React
3 3 (2.83%) .NET
4 2 (1.89%) Middleware
4 2 (1.89%) Node.js
4 2 (1.89%) Playwright
5 1 (0.94%) .NET Core
5 1 (0.94%) JSON
5 1 (0.94%) Lightning Web Components
5 1 (0.94%) REST
5 1 (0.94%) SOAP
5 1 (0.94%) Visualforce
Miscellaneous
1 10 (9.43%) Cloud Native
2 6 (5.66%) Product Ownership
3 3 (2.83%) Enterprise Storage
3 3 (2.83%) Management Information System
4 2 (1.89%) Hybrid Cloud
4 2 (1.89%) Social Media
5 1 (0.94%) Analytical Mindset
5 1 (0.94%) CMDB
5 1 (0.94%) Greenfield Project
5 1 (0.94%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 14 (13.21%) Linux
2 8 (7.55%) Unix
3 4 (3.77%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 2 (1.89%) Windows
5 1 (0.94%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 106 (100.00%) DevOps
2 48 (45.28%) CI/CD
3 40 (37.74%) Infrastructure as Code
4 33 (31.13%) Agile
5 21 (19.81%) Observability
5 21 (19.81%) Site Reliability Engineering
6 16 (15.09%) Mentoring
7 15 (14.15%) Performance Optimisation
8 14 (13.21%) Incident Response
9 12 (11.32%) Containerisation
9 12 (11.32%) Line Management
10 11 (10.38%) Infrastructure Engineering
11 9 (8.49%) Incident Management
11 9 (8.49%) Platform Engineering
12 8 (7.55%) DevSecOps
12 8 (7.55%) Roadmaps
13 7 (6.60%) Continuous Improvement
13 7 (6.60%) Continuous Integration
13 7 (6.60%) Technical Leadership
13 7 (6.60%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 19 (17.92%) Python
2 13 (12.26%) Java
3 12 (11.32%) Go
4 9 (8.49%) JavaScript
5 6 (5.66%) Bash
6 4 (3.77%) Bicep
6 4 (3.77%) SQL
7 2 (1.89%) C#
7 2 (1.89%) TypeScript
8 1 (0.94%) Apex Code
8 1 (0.94%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 14 (13.21%) Security Cleared
2 6 (5.66%) AWS Certification
2 6 (5.66%) SC Cleared
3 5 (4.72%) DV Cleared
4 2 (1.89%) Azure Certification
5 1 (0.94%) Computer Science Degree
5 1 (0.94%) Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (0.94%) Data Quality
1 1 (0.94%) NIST
1 1 (0.94%) QA
System Software
1 30 (28.30%) Docker
2 2 (1.89%) VMware Infrastructure
3 1 (0.94%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 41 (38.68%) Terraform
2 39 (36.79%) Kubernetes
3 21 (19.81%) Ansible
4 14 (13.21%) Prometheus
5 12 (11.32%) Grafana
6 10 (9.43%) Argo
7 4 (3.77%) Kustomize
8 2 (1.89%) Packer
9 1 (0.94%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 6 (5.66%) Google
2 4 (3.77%) Red Hat
2 4 (3.77%) VMware
3 3 (2.83%) Microsoft
4 2 (1.89%) Black Duck
4 2 (1.89%) Coverity
4 2 (1.89%) Pega
4 2 (1.89%) ServiceNow
5 1 (0.94%) Pure Storage
5 1 (0.94%) Salesforce
5 1 (0.94%) TIBCO