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

6 months to
8 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 450 191 276
Rank change year-on-year -259 +85 +43
Permanent jobs citing Kafka 163 543 675
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK excluding London 0.23% 1.65% 0.91%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 2.70% 10.61% 4.90%
Number of salaries quoted 121 146 309
10th Percentile £53,750 £45,625 £42,500
25th Percentile £59,500 £52,688 £48,750
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £72,500 £67,500 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year +7.41% +12.50% -13.21%
75th Percentile £93,750 £90,000 £73,750
90th Percentile £97,500 £103,750 £91,250
UK median annual salary £87,500 £82,500 £75,000
% change year-on-year +6.06% +10.00% -14.29%

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 6,045 5,116 13,770
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 8.58% 15.56% 18.51%
Number of salaries quoted 4,865 3,239 10,191
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% -9.43%

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 8 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 8 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 -154 51 £75,000 +11.11% 39
South East -61 46 £66,250 -7.99% 46
North West -95 45 £75,000 +11.11% 22
South West -70 19 £85,000 +25.93% 27
East of England -27 14 £72,500 +1.40% 9
Midlands -82 14 £87,500 +29.63% 13
Wales - 13 £70,000 - 5
West Midlands -34 12 £87,500 +34.62% 6
Scotland -88 7 £65,000 -3.70% 14
North East -47 4 £62,500 +31.58% 5
Yorkshire -36 2 £90,000 -19.20% 13
East Midlands -65 2 £71,500 +5.93% 7
Northern Ireland -72 1 - - 5
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 16 (9.82%) Apache Airflow
1 16 (9.82%) Apache Spark
2 11 (6.75%) Apache
3 2 (1.23%) Apache Qpid
3 2 (1.23%) CICS
4 1 (0.61%) Anypoint
4 1 (0.61%) ArcGIS
4 1 (0.61%) BizTalk Server
4 1 (0.61%) Camunda
4 1 (0.61%) Confluence
4 1 (0.61%) OpenStack
4 1 (0.61%) PegaRULES
Cloud Services
1 107 (65.64%) AWS
2 79 (48.47%) Azure
3 51 (31.29%) GCP
4 32 (19.63%) Serverless
5 23 (14.11%) GitHub
6 22 (13.50%) AWS Lambda
7 21 (12.88%) AWS CloudFormation
8 17 (10.43%) Amazon SQS
9 15 (9.20%) Amazon S3
9 15 (9.20%) Snowflake
10 13 (7.98%) dbt
11 12 (7.36%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 12 (7.36%) Amazon EventBridge
12 11 (6.75%) Amazon ECS
12 11 (6.75%) Amazon EKS
13 9 (5.52%) GitHub Copilot
13 9 (5.52%) Power Platform
14 8 (4.91%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 8 (4.91%) Datadog
15 7 (4.29%) Azure DevOps
Communications & Networking
1 20 (12.27%) MQTT
2 3 (1.84%) Network Security
3 2 (1.23%) Firewall
3 2 (1.23%) SSL
4 1 (0.61%) AMQP
4 1 (0.61%) ATM
4 1 (0.61%) Broadband
4 1 (0.61%) Radio Access Network
Database & Business Intelligence
1 35 (21.47%) MongoDB
2 33 (20.25%) NoSQL
3 27 (16.56%) PostgreSQL
4 18 (11.04%) SQL Server
5 17 (10.43%) Data Lake
6 16 (9.82%) Elasticsearch
7 13 (7.98%) Data Warehouse
7 13 (7.98%) MySQL
8 11 (6.75%) Amazon Redshift
8 11 (6.75%) Redis
9 10 (6.13%) Looker
10 9 (5.52%) DynamoDB
10 9 (5.52%) Flink
10 9 (5.52%) Power BI
10 9 (5.52%) Relational Database
11 8 (4.91%) BigQuery
11 8 (4.91%) Tableau
12 7 (4.29%) Amazon RDS
12 7 (4.29%) Snowflake Schema
13 6 (3.68%) Big Data
Development Applications
1 35 (21.47%) Git
2 16 (9.82%) Jenkins
3 15 (9.20%) GitLab
4 7 (4.29%) JIRA
4 7 (4.29%) MLflow
5 4 (2.45%) Atlassian Bamboo
5 4 (2.45%) Bitbucket
5 4 (2.45%) IntelliJ
5 4 (2.45%) JUnit
6 3 (1.84%) Cucumber
6 3 (1.84%) Eclipse
6 3 (1.84%) Postman
6 3 (1.84%) Selenium
6 3 (1.84%) SonarQube
7 2 (1.23%) JMeter
8 1 (0.61%) Mockito
8 1 (0.61%) Robot Framework
8 1 (0.61%) SpecFlow
8 1 (0.61%) TeamCity
8 1 (0.61%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 27 (16.56%) Social Skills
2 20 (12.27%) Analytical Skills
3 15 (9.20%) Finance
4 12 (7.36%) Public Sector
5 5 (3.07%) Banking
6 4 (2.45%) Advertising
7 3 (1.84%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 3 (1.84%) Law
8 2 (1.23%) Aerospace
8 2 (1.23%) Automotive
8 2 (1.23%) Telecoms
9 1 (0.61%) Documentation Skills
9 1 (0.61%) Games
9 1 (0.61%) Italian Language
9 1 (0.61%) Japanese Language
9 1 (0.61%) Manufacturing
9 1 (0.61%) Marketing
9 1 (0.61%) Retail
9 1 (0.61%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 43 (26.38%) Developer
2 37 (22.70%) Senior
3 32 (19.63%) Data Engineer
4 27 (16.56%) Lead
5 22 (13.50%) Architect
6 20 (12.27%) Java Developer
7 12 (7.36%) Senior Data Engineer
7 12 (7.36%) Software Engineer
8 11 (6.75%) Senior Developer
9 10 (6.13%) Full-Stack Developer
10 9 (5.52%) DevOps Engineer
11 8 (4.91%) Backend Developer
11 8 (4.91%) Integration Developer
11 8 (4.91%) Integration Engineer
11 8 (4.91%) Principal Engineer
11 8 (4.91%) Senior Systems Engineer
12 7 (4.29%) DevSecOps Engineer
12 7 (4.29%) Lead Developer
12 7 (4.29%) Systems Engineer
13 6 (3.68%) Integration Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 41 (25.15%) Spring
2 39 (23.93%) Spring Boot
3 35 (21.47%) REST
4 33 (20.25%) RESTful
5 27 (16.56%) RabbitMQ
6 20 (12.27%) Node.js
7 18 (11.04%) Hibernate
8 17 (10.43%) JPA
9 14 (8.59%) .NET
10 13 (7.98%) React
11 9 (5.52%) Apache NiFi
11 9 (5.52%) OpenAPI
11 9 (5.52%) PyTorch
11 9 (5.52%) scikit-learn
11 9 (5.52%) Swagger
11 9 (5.52%) TensorFlow
12 8 (4.91%) FastAPI
12 8 (4.91%) JWT
12 8 (4.91%) PySpark
12 8 (4.91%) SOAP
Miscellaneous
1 47 (28.83%) Cloud Native
2 40 (24.54%) Distributed Systems
3 18 (11.04%) Product Ownership
4 10 (6.13%) Onboarding
4 10 (6.13%) Public Cloud
5 7 (4.29%) Clustering
5 7 (4.29%) Robotics
6 6 (3.68%) Enterprise Software
6 6 (3.68%) Hybrid Cloud
6 6 (3.68%) Mainframe
7 5 (3.07%) Legacy Systems
8 4 (2.45%) Data Structures
8 4 (2.45%) Replication
8 4 (2.45%) Virtual Team
9 3 (1.84%) Distributed Computing
9 3 (1.84%) Marketing Technology
9 3 (1.84%) Self-Motivation
9 3 (1.84%) Team-Oriented Environment
10 2 (1.23%) Algorithms
10 2 (1.23%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 18 (11.04%) Linux
2 2 (1.23%) Windows
3 1 (0.61%) Android
3 1 (0.61%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 91 (55.83%) CI/CD
2 84 (51.53%) Agile
3 77 (47.24%) Microservices
4 64 (39.26%) DevOps
5 58 (35.58%) Event-Driven
6 50 (30.67%) AI
7 49 (30.06%) Observability
8 48 (29.45%) Containerisation
9 45 (27.61%) Infrastructure as Code
10 40 (24.54%) Analytics
11 36 (22.09%) Machine Learning
12 35 (21.47%) Data Pipeline
13 34 (20.86%) Scrum
14 33 (20.25%) Continuous Improvement
14 33 (20.25%) Mentoring
15 31 (19.02%) Data Modelling
15 31 (19.02%) Problem-Solving
16 30 (18.40%) Software Engineering
17 26 (15.95%) Test Automation
18 25 (15.34%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 91 (55.83%) Python
2 77 (47.24%) Java
3 71 (43.56%) SQL
4 27 (16.56%) JavaScript
5 21 (12.88%) TypeScript
6 15 (9.20%) Rust
7 11 (6.75%) C#
8 9 (5.52%) PowerShell
8 9 (5.52%) Scala
9 8 (4.91%) Go
9 8 (4.91%) Groovy
10 6 (3.68%) Kotlin
11 5 (3.07%) Bash
11 5 (3.07%) T-SQL
12 4 (2.45%) C++
12 4 (2.45%) Ruby
13 3 (1.84%) PL/SQL
14 2 (1.23%) Bicep
14 2 (1.23%) C
15 1 (0.61%) DataWeave
Qualifications
1 36 (22.09%) Security Cleared
2 24 (14.72%) SC Cleared
3 23 (14.11%) Degree
4 13 (7.98%) Computer Science Degree
5 9 (5.52%) DV Cleared
6 4 (2.45%) Master's Degree
7 3 (1.84%) Azure Certification
7 3 (1.84%) MBA
8 1 (0.61%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 1 (0.61%) BPSS Clearance
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 19 (11.66%) Data Quality
2 14 (8.59%) QA
3 8 (4.91%) GDPR
4 7 (4.29%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 6 (3.68%) Accessibility
6 4 (2.45%) WCAG
7 1 (0.61%) NIST
7 1 (0.61%) NIST 800
7 1 (0.61%) PCI DSS
7 1 (0.61%) PSD2
7 1 (0.61%) SOC 2
System Software
1 66 (40.49%) Docker
Systems Management
1 80 (49.08%) Kubernetes
2 55 (33.74%) Terraform
3 16 (9.82%) Ansible
3 16 (9.82%) Grafana
4 13 (7.98%) Prometheus
5 6 (3.68%) Puppet
6 5 (3.07%) Kibana
7 4 (2.45%) Argo
7 4 (2.45%) Podman
8 2 (1.23%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 18 (11.04%) Databricks
1 18 (11.04%) Microsoft
2 9 (5.52%) Oracle
3 8 (4.91%) Dell
3 8 (4.91%) Splunk
4 7 (4.29%) Cloudera
4 7 (4.29%) HubSpot
5 6 (3.68%) Google
6 5 (3.07%) Atlassian
7 4 (2.45%) Confluent
7 4 (2.45%) Dynatrace
7 4 (2.45%) NVIDIA
7 4 (2.45%) OpenAI
7 4 (2.45%) Pega
8 3 (1.84%) Adobe
8 3 (1.84%) Tenable
9 2 (1.23%) MuleSoft
10 1 (0.61%) Automation Anywhere
10 1 (0.61%) Rollbar
10 1 (0.61%) ServiceNow