Kafka Job Trends in the UK excluding London

Apache Kafka
UK > UK excluding London

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs advertised in the UK excluding London requiring Kafka skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 29 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
29 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 475 285 259
Rank change year-on-year -190 -26 +8
Permanent jobs citing Kafka 98 237 754
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK excluding London 0.15% 0.87% 1.11%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 1.99% 5.20% 5.51%
Number of salaries quoted 51 153 338
10th Percentile £52,500 £47,500 £42,500
25th Percentile £55,625 £53,750 £52,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £70,000 £67,500 £65,000
Median % change year-on-year +3.70% +3.85% -0.76%
75th Percentile £95,000 £87,500 £78,750
90th Percentile £97,500 £108,000 £91,934
UK median annual salary £100,000 £82,500 £77,500
% change year-on-year +21.21% +6.45% -13.89%

All Software Libraries and Frameworks
UK excluding London

Kafka falls under the Software Libraries and Frameworks category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent job vacancies requiring technical specification, industry standards, software libraries and framework skills in the UK excluding London.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for technical specification, industry standards, software libraries and framework skills 4,928 4,561 13,674
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 7.57% 16.74% 20.16%
Number of salaries quoted 3,820 3,557 10,240
10th Percentile £33,750 £32,500 £33,750
25th Percentile £45,000 £45,250 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £60,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year - +9.09% -4.35%
75th Percentile £73,750 £73,750 £68,750
90th Percentile £85,000 £87,500 £80,001
UK median annual salary £65,000 £66,100 £60,000
% change year-on-year -1.66% +10.17% -11.11%

Kafka
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing Kafka relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

Kafka job vacancy trend in the UK excluding London

Kafka
Salary Trend in the UK excluding London

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Kafka.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Kafka

Kafka
Salary Histogram in the UK excluding London

Salary distribution for jobs citing Kafka in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 29 April 2026.

Salary histogram for Kafka in the UK excluding London

Kafka
Job Locations in the UK excluding London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Kafka within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 29 April 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
North of England -91 36 £95,000 +31.96% 17
South East -79 33 £60,000 -15.79% 30
North West -63 23 £95,000 +38.18% 13
Yorkshire -69 10 £61,750 -17.67%
East of England -16 9 £62,500 -19.35% 5
Midlands -34 8 £72,500 +7.41% 4
Scotland -51 7 £65,000 -3.70% 7
South West -56 7 £75,000 +53.85% 12
West Midlands -33 4 £72,500 -6.45% 3
East Midlands -47 4 £120,000 +84.62% 1
North East -39 3 - - 4
Wales - 3 £55,000 -
Kafka
UK

Kafka
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding London 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 19 (19.39%) Apache Airflow
2 17 (17.35%) Apache Spark
3 8 (8.16%) Apache
3 8 (8.16%) OpenStack
4 2 (2.04%) Apache Qpid
4 2 (2.04%) CICS
5 1 (1.02%) Apache Synapse
5 1 (1.02%) Camunda
5 1 (1.02%) PegaRULES
Cloud Services
1 70 (71.43%) AWS
2 42 (42.86%) Azure
3 30 (30.61%) GCP
4 19 (19.39%) Serverless
5 16 (16.33%) Snowflake
6 15 (15.31%) dbt
7 14 (14.29%) Amazon ECS
7 14 (14.29%) Amazon SQS
8 13 (13.27%) Amazon EKS
9 11 (11.22%) Amazon S3
9 11 (11.22%) AWS CloudFormation
10 10 (10.20%) AWS Lambda
10 10 (10.20%) Azure Synapse Analytics
11 9 (9.18%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 8 (8.16%) Power Platform
13 6 (6.12%) Amazon EventBridge
13 6 (6.12%) Datadog
13 6 (6.12%) GitHub
14 5 (5.10%) Amazon Kinesis
14 5 (5.10%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 5 (5.10%) MQTT
2 3 (3.06%) HTTP
3 2 (2.04%) Firewall
3 2 (2.04%) SSL
4 1 (1.02%) AMQP
4 1 (1.02%) Broadband
4 1 (1.02%) Radio Access Network
Database & Business Intelligence
1 26 (26.53%) NoSQL
2 16 (16.33%) PostgreSQL
3 15 (15.31%) MongoDB
4 12 (12.24%) Data Lake
4 12 (12.24%) Relational Database
5 11 (11.22%) Data Warehouse
5 11 (11.22%) Elasticsearch
6 10 (10.20%) BigQuery
6 10 (10.20%) Looker
6 10 (10.20%) SQL Server
7 9 (9.18%) Amazon Redshift
7 9 (9.18%) DynamoDB
8 8 (8.16%) Power BI
8 8 (8.16%) Tableau
9 7 (7.14%) Flink
9 7 (7.14%) Snowflake Schema
10 6 (6.12%) Amazon RDS
11 5 (5.10%) Redis
12 4 (4.08%) MySQL
13 3 (3.06%) Big Data
Development Applications
1 22 (22.45%) Git
2 17 (17.35%) Jenkins
3 10 (10.20%) JIRA
4 7 (7.14%) MLflow
5 6 (6.12%) JUnit
6 5 (5.10%) GitLab
7 3 (3.06%) Eclipse
7 3 (3.06%) IntelliJ
8 2 (2.04%) Cucumber
9 1 (1.02%) git-flow
9 1 (1.02%) JMeter
9 1 (1.02%) LoadRunner
9 1 (1.02%) Mockito
9 1 (1.02%) Robot Framework
9 1 (1.02%) Selenium
9 1 (1.02%) SoapUI
9 1 (1.02%) SonarQube
9 1 (1.02%) SpecFlow
9 1 (1.02%) TeamCity
9 1 (1.02%) TestNG
General
1 19 (19.39%) Social Skills
2 14 (14.29%) Finance
3 13 (13.27%) Analytical Skills
4 4 (4.08%) Public Sector
5 3 (3.06%) Banking
5 3 (3.06%) Organisational Skills
6 2 (2.04%) Games
6 2 (2.04%) Law
7 1 (1.02%) Aerospace
7 1 (1.02%) Automotive
7 1 (1.02%) Marketing
7 1 (1.02%) Retail
7 1 (1.02%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 25 (25.51%) Developer
2 24 (24.49%) Data Engineer
3 22 (22.45%) Senior
4 19 (19.39%) Lead
5 16 (16.33%) Architect
6 12 (12.24%) Java Developer
7 9 (9.18%) Full-Stack Developer
8 8 (8.16%) Senior Systems Engineer
8 8 (8.16%) Solutions Architect
9 7 (7.14%) Senior Data Engineer
9 7 (7.14%) Systems Engineer
10 6 (6.12%) Full-Stack Java Developer
10 6 (6.12%) Integration Developer
10 6 (6.12%) Integration Engineer
10 6 (6.12%) Lead Developer
10 6 (6.12%) Senior Developer
11 5 (5.10%) Full-Stack Engineer
11 5 (5.10%) Lead Data Engineer
12 4 (4.08%) DevSecOps Engineer
12 4 (4.08%) Integration Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 30 (30.61%) REST
2 21 (21.43%) Spring
3 19 (19.39%) Node.js
4 18 (18.37%) React
4 18 (18.37%) Spring Boot
5 14 (14.29%) RESTful
6 12 (12.24%) Elastic Stack
6 12 (12.24%) RabbitMQ
7 8 (8.16%) AngularJS
7 8 (8.16%) Mustache
8 7 (7.14%) CSS
8 7 (7.14%) HTML
8 7 (7.14%) LangChain
8 7 (7.14%) Middleware
8 7 (7.14%) pgvector
8 7 (7.14%) PyTorch
8 7 (7.14%) scikit-learn
8 7 (7.14%) SOAP
8 7 (7.14%) TensorFlow
8 7 (7.14%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 26 (26.53%) Distributed Systems
2 20 (20.41%) Cloud Native
3 12 (12.24%) Product Ownership
4 7 (7.14%) Clustering
4 7 (7.14%) Public Cloud
5 6 (6.12%) Onboarding
6 3 (3.06%) Distributed Computing
6 3 (3.06%) Legacy Systems
7 2 (2.04%) Mainframe
8 1 (1.02%) Anti-Piracy
8 1 (1.02%) Data Structures
8 1 (1.02%) Enterprise Software
8 1 (1.02%) IoT
8 1 (1.02%) Low-Code
8 1 (1.02%) NHS
8 1 (1.02%) Replication
8 1 (1.02%) Robotics
8 1 (1.02%) Social Media
8 1 (1.02%) Sports Betting
8 1 (1.02%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 3 (3.06%) Linux
2 1 (1.02%) Android
2 1 (1.02%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 56 (57.14%) Agile
2 46 (46.94%) CI/CD
3 45 (45.92%) Microservices
4 35 (35.71%) Event-Driven
5 32 (32.65%) Analytics
5 32 (32.65%) Data Modelling
6 27 (27.55%) Data Pipeline
6 27 (27.55%) Scrum
7 26 (26.53%) DevOps
8 24 (24.49%) Data Engineering
9 23 (23.47%) Observability
10 22 (22.45%) Containerisation
11 21 (21.43%) ETL
12 20 (20.41%) AI
13 19 (19.39%) Continuous Improvement
13 19 (19.39%) Machine Learning
14 18 (18.37%) Test Automation
15 17 (17.35%) Data Science
15 17 (17.35%) Event-Driven Architecture
15 17 (17.35%) Full-Stack Development
Programming Languages
1 54 (55.10%) Python
2 49 (50.00%) SQL
3 46 (46.94%) Java
4 24 (24.49%) JavaScript
5 16 (16.33%) TypeScript
6 7 (7.14%) Rust
7 6 (6.12%) Groovy
8 5 (5.10%) C#
9 4 (4.08%) Scala
10 3 (3.06%) PL/SQL
11 2 (2.04%) C++
11 2 (2.04%) Go
11 2 (2.04%) T-SQL
12 1 (1.02%) C
12 1 (1.02%) Embedded C
12 1 (1.02%) Embedded C++
Qualifications
1 11 (11.22%) Security Cleared
2 9 (9.18%) Degree
3 7 (7.14%) SC Cleared
4 4 (4.08%) Computer Science Degree
4 4 (4.08%) DV Cleared
5 1 (1.02%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
5 1 (1.02%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 14 (14.29%) Data Quality
2 10 (10.20%) QA
3 7 (7.14%) California Consumer Privacy Act
3 7 (7.14%) GDPR
4 1 (1.02%) Accessibility
System Software
1 38 (38.78%) Docker
Systems Management
1 40 (40.82%) Kubernetes
2 26 (26.53%) Terraform
3 7 (7.14%) Ansible
4 6 (6.12%) Grafana
4 6 (6.12%) Prometheus
5 3 (3.06%) Kibana
6 2 (2.04%) Progress Chef
6 2 (2.04%) Puppet
7 1 (1.02%) HP Fortify
Vendors
1 16 (16.33%) Databricks
2 7 (7.14%) Cloudera
2 7 (7.14%) Dell
3 6 (6.12%) HubSpot
4 5 (5.10%) Microsoft
4 5 (5.10%) Pega
5 4 (4.08%) Informatica
5 4 (4.08%) Oracle
6 3 (3.06%) Adobe
6 3 (3.06%) Confluent
6 3 (3.06%) Google
6 3 (3.06%) MuleSoft
6 3 (3.06%) Salesforce
6 3 (3.06%) SAP
7 1 (1.02%) Automation Anywhere
7 1 (1.02%) IBM
7 1 (1.02%) Rollbar
7 1 (1.02%) ServiceNow
7 1 (1.02%) Splunk
7 1 (1.02%) UiPath