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 20 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 449 185 276
Rank change year-on-year -264 +91 +47
Permanent jobs citing Kafka 137 554 712
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK excluding London 0.20% 1.84% 0.89%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 2.43% 11.07% 4.82%
Number of salaries quoted 96 158 322
10th Percentile £53,750 £46,250 £42,500
25th Percentile £60,813 £53,750 £49,063
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £72,500 £70,000 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year +3.57% +16.67% -13.60%
75th Percentile £93,750 £91,875 £74,688
90th Percentile £97,500 £106,125 £91,250
UK median annual salary £90,000 £82,500 £75,000
% change year-on-year +9.09% +10.00% -15.24%

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 5,636 5,004 14,766
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 8.32% 16.64% 18.56%
Number of salaries quoted 4,548 3,148 10,957
10th Percentile £37,250 £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 £87,500 £80,000
UK median annual salary £65,000 £66,295 £60,000
% change year-on-year -1.95% +10.49% -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 20 June 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 20 June 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 -143 48 £77,500 +12.73% 18
South East -60 43 £67,500 -6.90% 23
North West -91 39 £77,500 +14.81% 12
East of England -19 12 £72,500 +1.40% 4
South West -81 12 £85,000 +25.93% 11
Midlands -86 11 £87,500 +29.63% 5
West Midlands -40 9 £87,500 +34.62% 3
Wales - 7 £70,000 - 3
Yorkshire -49 5 £90,000 +12.50% 3
Scotland -87 5 £65,000 -3.70% 7
North East -52 4 £62,500 +31.58% 3
East Midlands -73 2 £71,500 +5.93% 2
Northern Ireland -44 1 - - 9
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 17 (12.41%) Apache Airflow
2 16 (11.68%) Apache Spark
3 9 (6.57%) Apache
4 3 (2.19%) OpenStack
5 2 (1.46%) Apache Qpid
5 2 (1.46%) CICS
6 1 (0.73%) ArcGIS
6 1 (0.73%) Camunda
6 1 (0.73%) PegaRULES
Cloud Services
1 96 (70.07%) AWS
2 65 (47.45%) Azure
3 42 (30.66%) GCP
4 30 (21.90%) Serverless
5 19 (13.87%) AWS Lambda
6 17 (12.41%) GitHub
7 16 (11.68%) AWS CloudFormation
8 15 (10.95%) Amazon S3
8 15 (10.95%) Amazon SQS
9 14 (10.22%) dbt
9 14 (10.22%) Snowflake
10 13 (9.49%) Amazon ECS
10 13 (9.49%) Amazon EKS
11 11 (8.03%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 9 (6.57%) Amazon EventBridge
12 9 (6.57%) Power Platform
13 8 (5.84%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 7 (5.11%) Datadog
15 6 (4.38%) Azure DevOps
16 5 (3.65%) Amazon Kinesis
Communications & Networking
1 17 (12.41%) MQTT
2 3 (2.19%) Network Security
3 2 (1.46%) Firewall
3 2 (1.46%) SSL
4 1 (0.73%) AMQP
4 1 (0.73%) Broadband
4 1 (0.73%) HTTP
4 1 (0.73%) Radio Access Network
Database & Business Intelligence
1 29 (21.17%) NoSQL
2 25 (18.25%) MongoDB
3 20 (14.60%) PostgreSQL
4 17 (12.41%) Data Lake
5 15 (10.95%) SQL Server
6 14 (10.22%) Elasticsearch
7 13 (9.49%) Data Warehouse
8 11 (8.03%) Amazon Redshift
9 10 (7.30%) Looker
10 9 (6.57%) DynamoDB
10 9 (6.57%) Flink
10 9 (6.57%) Power BI
10 9 (6.57%) Redis
10 9 (6.57%) Relational Database
11 8 (5.84%) BigQuery
11 8 (5.84%) Tableau
12 7 (5.11%) Amazon RDS
12 7 (5.11%) MySQL
12 7 (5.11%) Snowflake Schema
13 5 (3.65%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 31 (22.63%) Git
2 14 (10.22%) GitLab
2 14 (10.22%) Jenkins
3 7 (5.11%) JIRA
3 7 (5.11%) MLflow
4 5 (3.65%) JUnit
5 4 (2.92%) IntelliJ
6 3 (2.19%) Atlassian Bamboo
6 3 (2.19%) Bitbucket
6 3 (2.19%) Cucumber
6 3 (2.19%) Eclipse
6 3 (2.19%) SonarQube
7 2 (1.46%) JMeter
7 2 (1.46%) Postman
7 2 (1.46%) Selenium
8 1 (0.73%) Mockito
8 1 (0.73%) Robot Framework
8 1 (0.73%) SpecFlow
8 1 (0.73%) TeamCity
8 1 (0.73%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 21 (15.33%) Social Skills
2 16 (11.68%) Analytical Skills
3 13 (9.49%) Finance
4 7 (5.11%) Public Sector
5 4 (2.92%) Advertising
6 3 (2.19%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 2 (1.46%) Banking
7 2 (1.46%) Games
7 2 (1.46%) Law
8 1 (0.73%) Aerospace
8 1 (0.73%) Automotive
8 1 (0.73%) Manufacturing
8 1 (0.73%) Marketing
8 1 (0.73%) Retail
8 1 (0.73%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 36 (26.28%) Developer
2 34 (24.82%) Senior
3 28 (20.44%) Data Engineer
4 21 (15.33%) Lead
5 19 (13.87%) Architect
6 16 (11.68%) Java Developer
7 11 (8.03%) Senior Developer
8 10 (7.30%) Senior Data Engineer
9 8 (5.84%) Backend Developer
9 8 (5.84%) Integration Engineer
9 8 (5.84%) Senior Systems Engineer
10 7 (5.11%) DevOps Engineer
10 7 (5.11%) DevSecOps Engineer
10 7 (5.11%) Integration Developer
10 7 (5.11%) Lead Developer
10 7 (5.11%) Software Engineer
10 7 (5.11%) Systems Engineer
11 6 (4.38%) Full-Stack Developer
11 6 (4.38%) Java Engineer
11 6 (4.38%) Principal Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 33 (24.09%) Spring
2 32 (23.36%) REST
3 30 (21.90%) Spring Boot
4 24 (17.52%) RESTful
5 19 (13.87%) RabbitMQ
6 18 (13.14%) Node.js
7 13 (9.49%) .NET
8 12 (8.76%) React
9 9 (6.57%) PyTorch
9 9 (6.57%) scikit-learn
9 9 (6.57%) TensorFlow
10 8 (5.84%) AngularJS
10 8 (5.84%) Hibernate
10 8 (5.84%) JPA
10 8 (5.84%) PySpark
10 8 (5.84%) SOAP
11 7 (5.11%) .NET Framework
11 7 (5.11%) JSON
11 7 (5.11%) Middleware
11 7 (5.11%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 39 (28.47%) Cloud Native
2 38 (27.74%) Distributed Systems
3 16 (11.68%) Product Ownership
4 8 (5.84%) Onboarding
4 8 (5.84%) Public Cloud
5 7 (5.11%) Clustering
6 6 (4.38%) Robotics
7 4 (2.92%) Data Structures
7 4 (2.92%) Enterprise Software
7 4 (2.92%) Hybrid Cloud
7 4 (2.92%) Mainframe
7 4 (2.92%) Replication
8 3 (2.19%) Legacy Systems
8 3 (2.19%) Team-Oriented Environment
9 2 (1.46%) Algorithms
9 2 (1.46%) Distributed Computing
9 2 (1.46%) Greenfield Project
9 2 (1.46%) Marketing Technology
9 2 (1.46%) Virtual Team
10 1 (0.73%) Renewable Energy
Operating Systems
1 13 (9.49%) Linux
2 1 (0.73%) Android
2 1 (0.73%) Apple iOS
2 1 (0.73%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 77 (56.20%) CI/CD
2 72 (52.55%) Agile
3 66 (48.18%) Microservices
4 51 (37.23%) Event-Driven
5 49 (35.77%) DevOps
6 44 (32.12%) AI
7 43 (31.39%) Containerisation
8 42 (30.66%) Observability
9 38 (27.74%) Infrastructure as Code
10 33 (24.09%) Analytics
11 31 (22.63%) Data Modelling
11 31 (22.63%) Machine Learning
12 30 (21.90%) Continuous Improvement
12 30 (21.90%) Data Pipeline
12 30 (21.90%) Mentoring
13 27 (19.71%) Scrum
14 22 (16.06%) Data Engineering
14 22 (16.06%) Test Automation
15 21 (15.33%) Data Science
15 21 (15.33%) Problem-Solving
Programming Languages
1 80 (58.39%) Python
2 65 (47.45%) SQL
3 61 (44.53%) Java
4 28 (20.44%) JavaScript
5 21 (15.33%) TypeScript
6 14 (10.22%) Rust
7 10 (7.30%) C#
8 8 (5.84%) Scala
9 7 (5.11%) PowerShell
10 6 (4.38%) Groovy
11 5 (3.65%) Go
11 5 (3.65%) T-SQL
12 4 (2.92%) C++
13 3 (2.19%) Bash
13 3 (2.19%) Kotlin
13 3 (2.19%) PL/SQL
14 2 (1.46%) Bicep
14 2 (1.46%) Ruby
15 1 (0.73%) C
15 1 (0.73%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 26 (18.98%) Security Cleared
2 21 (15.33%) Degree
3 18 (13.14%) SC Cleared
4 12 (8.76%) Computer Science Degree
5 5 (3.65%) DV Cleared
6 3 (2.19%) Master's Degree
7 2 (1.46%) MBA
8 1 (0.73%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 18 (13.14%) Data Quality
2 11 (8.03%) QA
3 7 (5.11%) California Consumer Privacy Act
3 7 (5.11%) GDPR
4 4 (2.92%) Accessibility
5 2 (1.46%) WCAG
6 1 (0.73%) SOC 2
System Software
1 56 (40.88%) Docker
Systems Management
1 66 (48.18%) Kubernetes
2 47 (34.31%) Terraform
3 15 (10.95%) Ansible
4 12 (8.76%) Grafana
5 10 (7.30%) Prometheus
6 6 (4.38%) Puppet
7 5 (3.65%) Kibana
8 4 (2.92%) Podman
9 3 (2.19%) Argo
10 2 (1.46%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 18 (13.14%) Microsoft
2 17 (12.41%) Databricks
3 9 (6.57%) Oracle
4 7 (5.11%) Cloudera
4 7 (5.11%) Dell
4 7 (5.11%) HubSpot
5 5 (3.65%) Google
5 5 (3.65%) Splunk
6 4 (2.92%) Confluent
6 4 (2.92%) NVIDIA
6 4 (2.92%) Pega
7 3 (2.19%) Atlassian
7 3 (2.19%) Dynatrace
7 3 (2.19%) OpenAI
7 3 (2.19%) Tenable
8 2 (1.46%) Adobe
9 1 (0.73%) Automation Anywhere
9 1 (0.73%) Informatica
9 1 (0.73%) Rollbar
9 1 (0.73%) ServiceNow