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 2 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
2 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 469 280 254
Rank change year-on-year -189 -26 +2
Permanent jobs citing Kafka 98 236 757
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% 5.19% 5.52%
Number of salaries quoted 52 158 335
10th Percentile £52,625 £47,500 £42,500
25th Percentile £55,938 £53,750 £51,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £70,000 £67,500 £62,500
Median % change year-on-year +3.70% +8.00% -4.91%
75th Percentile £95,000 £87,500 £78,750
90th Percentile £97,500 £106,125 £91,661
UK median annual salary £97,500 £82,500 £76,585
% change year-on-year +18.18% +7.72% -14.91%

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 4,913 4,544 13,714
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 7.52% 16.71% 20.15%
Number of salaries quoted 3,810 3,546 10,276
10th Percentile £33,750 £32,500 £33,750
25th Percentile £45,000 £45,500 £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 £80,000
UK median annual salary £65,000 £66,000 £60,000
% change year-on-year -1.52% +10.00% -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 2 May 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 2 May 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 -100 36 £95,000 +31.50% 30
South East -67 33 £60,000 -14.29% 37
North West -52 23 £95,000 +35.71% 19
Yorkshire -70 10 £61,750 -17.67% 5
East of England -16 9 £62,500 -19.35% 7
South West -62 8 £75,000 +50.00% 18
Midlands -34 7 £72,500 +7.41% 13
Scotland -56 7 £65,000 -3.70% 10
West Midlands -23 5 £72,500 -6.45% 6
North East -39 3 - - 6
Wales - 3 £55,000 - 1
East Midlands -42 2 £120,000 +84.62% 7
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 69 (70.41%) AWS
2 41 (41.84%) Azure
3 31 (31.63%) GCP
4 19 (19.39%) Serverless
5 15 (15.31%) Amazon ECS
5 15 (15.31%) dbt
6 14 (14.29%) Amazon EKS
6 14 (14.29%) Amazon SQS
6 14 (14.29%) Snowflake
7 12 (12.24%) AWS CloudFormation
8 11 (11.22%) Amazon S3
9 10 (10.20%) AWS Lambda
9 10 (10.20%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 9 (9.18%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 8 (8.16%) Power Platform
12 6 (6.12%) Amazon EventBridge
12 6 (6.12%) Datadog
12 6 (6.12%) GitHub
13 5 (5.10%) Amazon Kinesis
13 5 (5.10%) Azure DevOps
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 13 (13.27%) Data Lake
5 12 (12.24%) Relational Database
6 11 (11.22%) Data Warehouse
6 11 (11.22%) Elasticsearch
7 10 (10.20%) BigQuery
7 10 (10.20%) Looker
7 10 (10.20%) SQL Server
8 9 (9.18%) Amazon Redshift
8 9 (9.18%) DynamoDB
9 8 (8.16%) Power BI
9 8 (8.16%) Tableau
10 7 (7.14%) Flink
10 7 (7.14%) Snowflake Schema
11 6 (6.12%) Amazon RDS
12 5 (5.10%) Redis
13 4 (4.08%) MySQL
14 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%) Mockito
9 1 (1.02%) Postman
9 1 (1.02%) REST Assured
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 20 (20.41%) Social Skills
2 15 (15.31%) 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%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 1 (1.02%) Marketing
7 1 (1.02%) Retail
7 1 (1.02%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 26 (26.53%) Developer
2 24 (24.49%) Data Engineer
3 22 (22.45%) Senior
4 17 (17.35%) Lead
5 14 (14.29%) Architect
6 13 (13.27%) Java Developer
7 9 (9.18%) Full-Stack Developer
8 8 (8.16%) Senior Systems Engineer
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
10 6 (6.12%) Solutions Architect
11 5 (5.10%) Full-Stack Engineer
11 5 (5.10%) Lead Data Engineer
12 4 (4.08%) DevSecOps Engineer
12 4 (4.08%) Java Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 30 (30.61%) REST
2 22 (22.45%) Spring
3 19 (19.39%) Spring Boot
4 17 (17.35%) Node.js
5 16 (16.33%) React
6 15 (15.31%) RESTful
7 12 (12.24%) Elastic Stack
7 12 (12.24%) RabbitMQ
8 8 (8.16%) AngularJS
8 8 (8.16%) Mustache
9 7 (7.14%) CSS
9 7 (7.14%) LangChain
9 7 (7.14%) LlamaIndex
9 7 (7.14%) Middleware
9 7 (7.14%) pgvector
9 7 (7.14%) PyTorch
9 7 (7.14%) scikit-learn
9 7 (7.14%) SOAP
9 7 (7.14%) TensorFlow
9 7 (7.14%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 27 (27.55%) Distributed Systems
2 19 (19.39%) 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%) Data Structures
7 2 (2.04%) Mainframe
8 1 (1.02%) Anti-Piracy
8 1 (1.02%) Enterprise Software
8 1 (1.02%) Greenfield Project
8 1 (1.02%) Hybrid Cloud
8 1 (1.02%) IoT
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%) 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 48 (48.98%) CI/CD
3 44 (44.90%) Microservices
4 34 (34.69%) Event-Driven
5 32 (32.65%) Analytics
5 32 (32.65%) Data Modelling
6 27 (27.55%) Data Pipeline
6 27 (27.55%) DevOps
6 27 (27.55%) Scrum
7 24 (24.49%) Data Engineering
7 24 (24.49%) Observability
8 22 (22.45%) Containerisation
9 21 (21.43%) ETL
10 20 (20.41%) AI
11 19 (19.39%) Continuous Improvement
11 19 (19.39%) Machine Learning
12 18 (18.37%) Event-Driven Architecture
12 18 (18.37%) Infrastructure as Code
12 18 (18.37%) Test Automation
13 17 (17.35%) Full-Stack Development
Programming Languages
1 55 (56.12%) Python
2 49 (50.00%) SQL
3 45 (45.92%) 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%) Bicep
12 1 (1.02%) C
12 1 (1.02%) Embedded C
12 1 (1.02%) Embedded C++
12 1 (1.02%) PowerShell
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 39 (39.80%) Docker
Systems Management
1 41 (41.84%) Kubernetes
2 25 (25.51%) 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 17 (17.35%) 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%) Oracle
6 3 (3.06%) Confluent
6 3 (3.06%) Google
7 2 (2.04%) Informatica
8 1 (1.02%) Adobe
8 1 (1.02%) Automation Anywhere
8 1 (1.02%) IBM
8 1 (1.02%) MuleSoft
8 1 (1.02%) Rollbar
8 1 (1.02%) Salesforce
8 1 (1.02%) SAP
8 1 (1.02%) ServiceNow
8 1 (1.02%) Splunk
8 1 (1.02%) UiPath