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 13 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 479 262 251
Rank change year-on-year -217 -11 +15
Permanent jobs citing Kafka 96 246 744
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK excluding London 0.16% 0.94% 1.13%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 1.98% 5.19% 5.48%
Number of salaries quoted 47 155 337
10th Percentile £52,500 £46,783 £46,250
25th Percentile £55,625 £53,750 £52,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £70,000 £67,500 £69,447
Median % change year-on-year +3.70% -2.80% +6.84%
75th Percentile £95,000 £88,750 £80,000
90th Percentile £97,500 £110,000 £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 4,844 4,744 13,570
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 7.90% 18.22% 20.58%
Number of salaries quoted 3,744 3,685 10,193
10th Percentile £32,500 £33,750 £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 £72,500 £73,886 £70,000
90th Percentile £85,000 £86,250 £81,250
UK median annual salary £65,000 £66,200 £60,000
% change year-on-year -1.81% +10.33% -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 13 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 13 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
South East -81 33 £64,500 -7.86% 31
North of England -106 32 £72,500 +2.12% 23
North West -62 19 £95,000 +38.18% 18
Yorkshire -68 10 £61,750 -16.27% 3
East of England -29 9 £62,500 -19.35% 6
Scotland -40 8 £65,000 - 4
Midlands -43 8 £72,500 +11.54% 5
South West -61 7 £75,000 +42.86% 14
West Midlands -14 4 £72,500 +3.57% 4
East Midlands -45 4 £120,000 +84.62% 1
Wales - 4 £55,816 - 1
North East -32 3 - - 2
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 (19.79%) Apache Airflow
2 17 (17.71%) Apache Spark
3 8 (8.33%) Apache
3 8 (8.33%) OpenStack
4 2 (2.08%) Apache Qpid
4 2 (2.08%) CICS
5 1 (1.04%) Apache Synapse
5 1 (1.04%) Camunda
5 1 (1.04%) PegaRULES
Cloud Services
1 62 (64.58%) AWS
2 44 (45.83%) Azure
3 33 (34.38%) GCP
4 18 (18.75%) Serverless
5 16 (16.67%) Snowflake
6 15 (15.63%) dbt
7 13 (13.54%) Amazon EKS
7 13 (13.54%) Amazon SQS
8 12 (12.50%) Amazon S3
9 11 (11.46%) Amazon ECS
10 10 (10.42%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 10 (10.42%) GitHub
11 8 (8.33%) AWS CloudFormation
11 8 (8.33%) AWS Lambda
11 8 (8.33%) Power Platform
12 6 (6.25%) Azure DevOps
12 6 (6.25%) SaaS
13 4 (4.17%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 4 (4.17%) Amazon Kinesis
13 4 (4.17%) Azure Service Bus
Communications & Networking
1 5 (5.21%) MQTT
2 3 (3.13%) HTTP
3 2 (2.08%) Firewall
3 2 (2.08%) SSL
4 1 (1.04%) AMQP
4 1 (1.04%) Broadband
4 1 (1.04%) Radio Access Network
Database & Business Intelligence
1 30 (31.25%) NoSQL
2 19 (19.79%) PostgreSQL
3 15 (15.63%) MongoDB
4 12 (12.50%) Data Lake
4 12 (12.50%) Data Warehouse
4 12 (12.50%) Relational Database
5 11 (11.46%) Elasticsearch
6 10 (10.42%) BigQuery
6 10 (10.42%) Looker
6 10 (10.42%) SQL Server
7 8 (8.33%) Amazon Redshift
7 8 (8.33%) DynamoDB
7 8 (8.33%) Power BI
7 8 (8.33%) Tableau
8 7 (7.29%) Snowflake Schema
9 6 (6.25%) MySQL
9 6 (6.25%) Redis
10 5 (5.21%) Flink
11 4 (4.17%) Big Data
12 3 (3.13%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 22 (22.92%) Git
2 19 (19.79%) Jenkins
3 8 (8.33%) JIRA
4 7 (7.29%) MLflow
5 6 (6.25%) JUnit
6 5 (5.21%) GitLab
7 4 (4.17%) Cucumber
7 4 (4.17%) git-flow
8 3 (3.13%) Eclipse
8 3 (3.13%) IntelliJ
9 2 (2.08%) JMeter
10 1 (1.04%) LoadRunner
10 1 (1.04%) Mockito
10 1 (1.04%) Robot Framework
10 1 (1.04%) Selenium
10 1 (1.04%) SoapUI
10 1 (1.04%) SonarQube
10 1 (1.04%) SpecFlow
10 1 (1.04%) TeamCity
10 1 (1.04%) TestNG
General
1 20 (20.83%) Social Skills
2 13 (13.54%) Finance
3 11 (11.46%) Analytical Skills
4 4 (4.17%) Public Sector
5 3 (3.13%) Banking
5 3 (3.13%) Organisational Skills
6 2 (2.08%) Aerospace
6 2 (2.08%) Games
6 2 (2.08%) Law
7 1 (1.04%) Automotive
7 1 (1.04%) Marketing
7 1 (1.04%) Retail
7 1 (1.04%) Tech for Good
7 1 (1.04%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 27 (28.13%) Developer
2 23 (23.96%) Senior
3 22 (22.92%) Data Engineer
4 17 (17.71%) Lead
5 13 (13.54%) Architect
5 13 (13.54%) Java Developer
6 12 (12.50%) Full-Stack Developer
7 9 (9.38%) Senior Developer
8 8 (8.33%) Senior Systems Engineer
8 8 (8.33%) Solutions Architect
9 7 (7.29%) Systems Engineer
10 6 (6.25%) Full-Stack Java Developer
11 5 (5.21%) Full-Stack Engineer
11 5 (5.21%) Java Engineer
11 5 (5.21%) Lead Data Engineer
11 5 (5.21%) Senior Data Engineer
12 4 (4.17%) DevSecOps Engineer
12 4 (4.17%) Principal Architect
13 3 (3.13%) Lead Java Engineer
13 3 (3.13%) Supply Chain Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 25 (26.04%) REST
2 22 (22.92%) React
2 22 (22.92%) Spring
3 20 (20.83%) Spring Boot
4 16 (16.67%) Node.js
5 13 (13.54%) RESTful
6 11 (11.46%) RabbitMQ
7 10 (10.42%) CSS
7 10 (10.42%) Elastic Stack
7 10 (10.42%) HTML
8 9 (9.38%) .NET
9 8 (8.33%) AngularJS
9 8 (8.33%) Mustache
10 7 (7.29%) GraphQL
10 7 (7.29%) LangChain
10 7 (7.29%) pgvector
10 7 (7.29%) PyTorch
10 7 (7.29%) scikit-learn
10 7 (7.29%) TensorFlow
10 7 (7.29%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 22 (22.92%) Distributed Systems
2 20 (20.83%) Cloud Native
3 13 (13.54%) Product Ownership
4 7 (7.29%) Clustering
4 7 (7.29%) Public Cloud
5 3 (3.13%) Distributed Computing
5 3 (3.13%) Legacy Systems
6 2 (2.08%) Enterprise Software
6 2 (2.08%) Mainframe
6 2 (2.08%) Onboarding
7 1 (1.04%) Anti-Piracy
7 1 (1.04%) Data Structures
7 1 (1.04%) IoT
7 1 (1.04%) Low-Code
7 1 (1.04%) NHS
7 1 (1.04%) Replication
7 1 (1.04%) Robotics
7 1 (1.04%) Social Media
7 1 (1.04%) Sports Betting
7 1 (1.04%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 4 (4.17%) Linux
2 1 (1.04%) Android
2 1 (1.04%) Apple iOS
2 1 (1.04%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 1 (1.04%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 58 (60.42%) Agile
2 47 (48.96%) CI/CD
3 45 (46.88%) Microservices
4 31 (32.29%) Analytics
4 31 (32.29%) Event-Driven
5 29 (30.21%) DevOps
6 28 (29.17%) Data Modelling
7 25 (26.04%) Data Engineering
7 25 (26.04%) Data Pipeline
7 25 (26.04%) Scrum
8 21 (21.88%) AI
8 21 (21.88%) ETL
9 20 (20.83%) Full-Stack Development
10 19 (19.79%) Continuous Improvement
10 19 (19.79%) Observability
11 18 (18.75%) Machine Learning
12 17 (17.71%) Containerisation
12 17 (17.71%) Data Science
13 16 (16.67%) Data Governance
13 16 (16.67%) Event-Driven Architecture
Programming Languages
1 48 (50.00%) Python
2 47 (48.96%) SQL
3 44 (45.83%) Java
4 22 (22.92%) JavaScript
5 17 (17.71%) TypeScript
6 9 (9.38%) C#
7 7 (7.29%) Rust
8 6 (6.25%) Groovy
9 5 (5.21%) Go
10 4 (4.17%) Scala
11 3 (3.13%) PL/SQL
12 2 (2.08%) C++
12 2 (2.08%) T-SQL
13 1 (1.04%) Bash
13 1 (1.04%) C
13 1 (1.04%) Embedded C
13 1 (1.04%) Embedded C++
13 1 (1.04%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 12 (12.50%) Security Cleared
2 8 (8.33%) Degree
3 7 (7.29%) SC Cleared
4 5 (5.21%) DV Cleared
5 3 (3.13%) Computer Science Degree
6 1 (1.04%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
6 1 (1.04%) Azure Certification
6 1 (1.04%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 12 (12.50%) Data Quality
2 10 (10.42%) QA
3 7 (7.29%) California Consumer Privacy Act
3 7 (7.29%) GDPR
4 1 (1.04%) Accessibility
System Software
1 34 (35.42%) Docker
2 1 (1.04%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 36 (37.50%) Kubernetes
2 21 (21.88%) Terraform
3 8 (8.33%) Ansible
4 7 (7.29%) Grafana
5 6 (6.25%) Prometheus
6 2 (2.08%) Kibana
6 2 (2.08%) Progress Chef
6 2 (2.08%) Puppet
7 1 (1.04%) HP Fortify
Vendors
1 16 (16.67%) Databricks
2 7 (7.29%) Cloudera
2 7 (7.29%) Dell
3 5 (5.21%) Oracle
3 5 (5.21%) Pega
4 4 (4.17%) Informatica
4 4 (4.17%) Microsoft
5 3 (3.13%) Adobe
5 3 (3.13%) Confluent
5 3 (3.13%) Google
5 3 (3.13%) HubSpot
5 3 (3.13%) MuleSoft
5 3 (3.13%) Salesforce
5 3 (3.13%) SAP
6 2 (2.08%) Splunk
7 1 (1.04%) ArcSight
7 1 (1.04%) Automation Anywhere
7 1 (1.04%) IBM
7 1 (1.04%) Rollbar
7 1 (1.04%) ServiceNow