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 15 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
15 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 450 196 273
Rank change year-on-year -254 +77 +49
Permanent jobs citing Kafka 178 537 667
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK excluding London 0.25% 1.59% 0.91%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 2.90% 10.51% 4.98%
Number of salaries quoted 132 142 303
10th Percentile £53,750 £45,125 £42,500
25th Percentile £61,250 £52,500 £46,875
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £70,000 £67,500 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year +3.70% +17.39% -17.86%
75th Percentile £90,313 £89,375 £73,750
90th Percentile £97,500 £100,000 £91,250
UK median annual salary £85,000 £82,500 £73,750
% change year-on-year +3.03% +11.86% -15.71%

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 6,138 5,110 13,389
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 8.58% 15.12% 18.26%
Number of salaries quoted 4,929 3,231 9,854
10th Percentile £37,500 £32,500 £33,750
25th Percentile £46,250 £45,000 £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 £90,000 £86,250 £80,000
UK median annual salary £65,000 £67,500 £60,000
% change year-on-year -3.70% +12.50% -10.45%

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 15 July 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 15 July 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 -141 53 £75,000 +11.11% 44
South East -56 48 £66,250 -7.99% 45
North West -91 45 £75,000 +11.11% 25
South West -74 21 £85,000 +30.77% 24
Midlands -82 18 £85,000 +25.93% 9
West Midlands -41 16 £86,250 +43.75% 4
Wales - 16 £70,000 - 3
East of England -23 15 £72,500 +1.40% 7
Scotland -76 9 £65,000 -3.70% 13
Yorkshire -39 4 £66,805 -40.02% 11
North East -59 4 £62,500 +31.58% 8
East Midlands -64 2 £71,500 +5.93% 5
Northern Ireland -70 1 - - 4
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 21 (11.80%) Apache Spark
2 17 (9.55%) Apache Airflow
3 11 (6.18%) Apache
4 2 (1.12%) Anypoint
4 2 (1.12%) Apache Qpid
4 2 (1.12%) BizTalk Server
4 2 (1.12%) CICS
5 1 (0.56%) ArcGIS
5 1 (0.56%) Camunda
5 1 (0.56%) Confluence
5 1 (0.56%) OpenStack
5 1 (0.56%) PegaRULES
Cloud Services
1 118 (66.29%) AWS
2 90 (50.56%) Azure
3 54 (30.34%) GCP
4 32 (17.98%) Serverless
5 27 (15.17%) GitHub
6 24 (13.48%) AWS CloudFormation
7 22 (12.36%) AWS Lambda
8 20 (11.24%) Amazon SQS
9 16 (8.99%) Amazon S3
9 16 (8.99%) Snowflake
10 14 (7.87%) Amazon EventBridge
11 13 (7.30%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 13 (7.30%) dbt
12 12 (6.74%) GitHub Copilot
13 11 (6.18%) Amazon ECS
13 11 (6.18%) Amazon EKS
14 10 (5.62%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 9 (5.06%) Azure DevOps
15 9 (5.06%) Power Platform
16 8 (4.49%) Datadog
Communications & Networking
1 21 (11.80%) MQTT
2 3 (1.69%) Network Security
3 2 (1.12%) Firewall
3 2 (1.12%) SSL
4 1 (0.56%) AMQP
4 1 (0.56%) ATM
4 1 (0.56%) Broadband
4 1 (0.56%) Radio Access Network
Database & Business Intelligence
1 37 (20.79%) MongoDB
2 32 (17.98%) NoSQL
3 31 (17.42%) PostgreSQL
4 20 (11.24%) SQL Server
5 18 (10.11%) MySQL
6 17 (9.55%) Data Lake
6 17 (9.55%) Elasticsearch
7 13 (7.30%) Data Warehouse
8 12 (6.74%) Amazon Redshift
8 12 (6.74%) Redis
9 11 (6.18%) Big Data
9 11 (6.18%) Relational Database
10 10 (5.62%) Looker
11 9 (5.06%) DynamoDB
11 9 (5.06%) Flink
11 9 (5.06%) Power BI
12 8 (4.49%) BigQuery
13 7 (3.93%) Amazon RDS
13 7 (3.93%) Snowflake Schema
13 7 (3.93%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 39 (21.91%) Git
2 19 (10.67%) Jenkins
3 16 (8.99%) GitLab
4 7 (3.93%) JIRA
4 7 (3.93%) MLflow
5 4 (2.25%) Atlassian Bamboo
5 4 (2.25%) Bitbucket
5 4 (2.25%) IntelliJ
5 4 (2.25%) JUnit
6 3 (1.69%) Cucumber
6 3 (1.69%) Eclipse
6 3 (1.69%) Postman
6 3 (1.69%) Selenium
6 3 (1.69%) SonarQube
7 2 (1.12%) JMeter
8 1 (0.56%) Claude Code
8 1 (0.56%) Karma Test Runner
8 1 (0.56%) minitest
8 1 (0.56%) Robot Framework
8 1 (0.56%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 31 (17.42%) Social Skills
2 25 (14.04%) Analytical Skills
3 20 (11.24%) Public Sector
4 16 (8.99%) Finance
5 6 (3.37%) Banking
6 4 (2.25%) Advertising
7 3 (1.69%) Aerospace
7 3 (1.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 3 (1.69%) Law
8 2 (1.12%) Automotive
8 2 (1.12%) Telecoms
9 1 (0.56%) Billing
9 1 (0.56%) Documentation Skills
9 1 (0.56%) Games
9 1 (0.56%) Italian Language
9 1 (0.56%) Japanese Language
9 1 (0.56%) Manufacturing
9 1 (0.56%) Marketing
9 1 (0.56%) Retail
9 1 (0.56%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 50 (28.09%) Developer
2 45 (25.28%) Senior
3 38 (21.35%) Data Engineer
4 27 (15.17%) Lead
5 23 (12.92%) Java Developer
6 21 (11.80%) Architect
7 17 (9.55%) Senior Data Engineer
8 14 (7.87%) Senior Developer
9 12 (6.74%) Full-Stack Developer
9 12 (6.74%) Software Engineer
10 9 (5.06%) Backend Developer
10 9 (5.06%) DevOps Engineer
10 9 (5.06%) Integration Developer
10 9 (5.06%) Principal Engineer
11 8 (4.49%) Full-Stack Java Developer
11 8 (4.49%) Integration Engineer
11 8 (4.49%) Senior Systems Engineer
12 7 (3.93%) Lead Developer
12 7 (3.93%) Python Developer
12 7 (3.93%) Systems Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 47 (26.40%) Spring
2 45 (25.28%) Spring Boot
3 38 (21.35%) REST
3 38 (21.35%) RESTful
4 31 (17.42%) RabbitMQ
5 22 (12.36%) Hibernate
6 21 (11.80%) JPA
6 21 (11.80%) Node.js
7 15 (8.43%) React
8 14 (7.87%) .NET
9 13 (7.30%) PySpark
10 10 (5.62%) FastAPI
10 10 (5.62%) OpenAPI
10 10 (5.62%) Swagger
11 9 (5.06%) JWT
11 9 (5.06%) OAuth
11 9 (5.06%) PyTorch
11 9 (5.06%) scikit-learn
11 9 (5.06%) TensorFlow
12 8 (4.49%) SOAP
Miscellaneous
1 51 (28.65%) Cloud Native
2 43 (24.16%) Distributed Systems
3 21 (11.80%) Product Ownership
4 10 (5.62%) Onboarding
4 10 (5.62%) Public Cloud
5 8 (4.49%) Enterprise Software
6 7 (3.93%) Clustering
6 7 (3.93%) Hybrid Cloud
6 7 (3.93%) Mainframe
6 7 (3.93%) Robotics
7 6 (3.37%) Legacy Systems
8 5 (2.81%) Self-Motivation
8 5 (2.81%) Virtual Team
9 4 (2.25%) Data Structures
9 4 (2.25%) Replication
10 3 (1.69%) Distributed Computing
10 3 (1.69%) Greenfield Project
10 3 (1.69%) Marketing Technology
10 3 (1.69%) Team-Oriented Environment
11 2 (1.12%) AI Agents
Operating Systems
1 20 (11.24%) Linux
2 2 (1.12%) Windows
3 1 (0.56%) Android
3 1 (0.56%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 101 (56.74%) CI/CD
2 88 (49.44%) Agile
3 83 (46.63%) Microservices
4 72 (40.45%) DevOps
5 62 (34.83%) Event-Driven
6 53 (29.78%) AI
7 52 (29.21%) Containerisation
8 51 (28.65%) Observability
9 50 (28.09%) Infrastructure as Code
10 47 (26.40%) Analytics
11 41 (23.03%) Machine Learning
11 41 (23.03%) Mentoring
12 40 (22.47%) Data Pipeline
13 39 (21.91%) Continuous Improvement
14 37 (20.79%) Scrum
15 36 (20.22%) Problem-Solving
15 36 (20.22%) Software Engineering
16 32 (17.98%) Data Modelling
17 29 (16.29%) Data Engineering
18 28 (15.73%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 101 (56.74%) Python
2 81 (45.51%) Java
3 77 (43.26%) SQL
4 28 (15.73%) JavaScript
5 21 (11.80%) TypeScript
6 15 (8.43%) Rust
7 11 (6.18%) C#
8 9 (5.06%) Go
8 9 (5.06%) PowerShell
8 9 (5.06%) Scala
9 6 (3.37%) Groovy
9 6 (3.37%) Kotlin
9 6 (3.37%) Ruby
10 5 (2.81%) Bash
10 5 (2.81%) T-SQL
11 4 (2.25%) C++
12 3 (1.69%) PL/SQL
13 2 (1.12%) Bicep
13 2 (1.12%) C
13 2 (1.12%) DataWeave
Qualifications
1 40 (22.47%) Security Cleared
2 28 (15.73%) SC Cleared
3 26 (14.61%) Degree
4 14 (7.87%) Computer Science Degree
5 9 (5.06%) DV Cleared
6 6 (3.37%) Azure Certification
7 4 (2.25%) Master's Degree
8 3 (1.69%) MBA
9 1 (0.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 1 (0.56%) BPSS Clearance
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 20 (11.24%) Data Quality
2 16 (8.99%) QA
3 9 (5.06%) GDPR
4 7 (3.93%) Accessibility
4 7 (3.93%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 5 (2.81%) WCAG
6 1 (0.56%) NIST
6 1 (0.56%) NIST 800
6 1 (0.56%) PCI DSS
6 1 (0.56%) PSD2
6 1 (0.56%) SOC 2
System Software
1 73 (41.01%) Docker
Systems Management
1 86 (48.31%) Kubernetes
2 59 (33.15%) Terraform
3 17 (9.55%) Grafana
4 16 (8.99%) Ansible
5 14 (7.87%) Prometheus
6 6 (3.37%) Puppet
7 5 (2.81%) Kibana
8 4 (2.25%) Argo
8 4 (2.25%) Podman
9 2 (1.12%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 20 (11.24%) Databricks
2 19 (10.67%) Microsoft
3 9 (5.06%) Google
3 9 (5.06%) Oracle
3 9 (5.06%) Splunk
4 8 (4.49%) Dell
5 7 (3.93%) Cloudera
5 7 (3.93%) HubSpot
6 5 (2.81%) Atlassian
6 5 (2.81%) OpenAI
7 4 (2.25%) Confluent
7 4 (2.25%) Dynatrace
7 4 (2.25%) Informatica
7 4 (2.25%) NVIDIA
7 4 (2.25%) Pega
8 3 (1.69%) Adobe
8 3 (1.69%) MuleSoft
8 3 (1.69%) Tenable
9 2 (1.12%) webMethods
10 1 (0.56%) Yahoo!