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 vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 17 September 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 194 280 276
Rank change year-on-year +86 -4 -52
Permanent jobs citing Kafka 500 441 366
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 1.46% 0.80% 1.05%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 11.41% 4.47% 4.24%
Number of salaries quoted 118 202 283
10th Percentile £43,750 - £47,100
25th Percentile £52,500 £42,500 £56,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £67,500 £55,000 £70,000
Median % change year-on-year +22.73% -21.43% -9.09%
75th Percentile £83,438 £66,875 £84,056
90th Percentile £97,500 £85,000 £90,000
UK median annual salary £82,500 £70,000 £85,000
% change year-on-year +17.86% -17.65% -

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 4,384 9,857 8,622
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 12.76% 17.83% 24.70%
Number of salaries quoted 2,629 5,960 6,784
10th Percentile £32,500 £35,000 £36,250
25th Percentile £43,750 £43,750 £45,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £57,500 £55,000 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -4.35% +4.55%
75th Percentile £72,500 £70,000 £72,500
90th Percentile £85,000 £80,000 £84,056
UK median annual salary £67,500 £65,000 £66,500
% change year-on-year +3.85% -2.26% +2.31%

Kafka
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Job postings citing Kafka as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

Job vacancy trend for Kafka 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 17 September 2025.

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 17 September 2025. 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 +121 169 £70,000 +27.27% 61
North West +98 153 £68,750 +25.00% 39
Scotland +18 134 £57,500 -11.54% 15
Midlands +105 69 £67,500 +12.50% 25
South East -16 60 £71,500 +36.19% 81
East Midlands +72 42 £67,500 - 13
South West +78 36 £67,500 -3.57% 16
West Midlands +63 27 £56,250 -6.25% 11
East of England +15 21 £75,750 +26.25% 15
Northern Ireland +22 14 £55,000 +4.76% 2
Yorkshire +10 10 £75,000 +36.36% 16
North East +23 6 £47,500 -3.60% 6
Kafka
UK

Kafka
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the UK excluding London by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 163 (32.60%) Confluence
2 38 (7.60%) Apache Spark
3 24 (4.80%) Apache
3 24 (4.80%) Apache Airflow
4 9 (1.80%) Appian
5 5 (1.00%) nginx
5 5 (1.00%) Tomcat
6 4 (0.80%) Cloud Foundry
7 3 (0.60%) SAS
8 2 (0.40%) JBoss
8 2 (0.40%) Mule
8 2 (0.40%) OpenStack
9 1 (0.20%) Apache Superset
9 1 (0.20%) Jupyter
9 1 (0.20%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 1 (0.20%) WebSphere
Business Applications
1 1 (0.20%) Dynamics CRM
1 1 (0.20%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 393 (78.60%) AWS
2 306 (61.20%) Azure
3 197 (39.40%) GCP
4 28 (5.60%) Amazon S3
5 26 (5.20%) Serverless
6 23 (4.60%) GitHub
7 17 (3.40%) AWS Lambda
8 16 (3.20%) Power Platform
9 13 (2.60%) SaaS
9 13 (2.60%) Snowflake
10 12 (2.40%) Amazon SQS
11 10 (2.00%) Amazon ECS
11 10 (2.00%) Azure DevOps
12 9 (1.80%) MinIO
13 6 (1.20%) Amazon EKS
13 6 (1.20%) Amazon OpenSearch
13 6 (1.20%) Cloud Computing
14 5 (1.00%) Amazon ElastiCache
14 5 (1.00%) OpenShift
15 4 (0.80%) Amazon Kinesis
Communications & Networking
1 7 (1.40%) HTTP
2 3 (0.60%) Internet
2 3 (0.60%) PuTTY
3 2 (0.40%) Broadband
3 2 (0.40%) MQTT
4 1 (0.20%) AMQP
4 1 (0.20%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 285 (57.00%) SQL Server
2 89 (17.80%) MongoDB
3 59 (11.80%) NoSQL
4 50 (10.00%) PostgreSQL
5 38 (7.60%) Big Data
6 32 (6.40%) Relational Database
7 22 (4.40%) MySQL
8 21 (4.20%) Hadoop
9 18 (3.60%) Elasticsearch
10 16 (3.20%) Data Warehouse
11 14 (2.80%) Apache Cassandra
12 13 (2.60%) Amazon Athena
12 13 (2.60%) Apache Hive
13 12 (2.40%) DynamoDB
14 11 (2.20%) Amazon Aurora
14 11 (2.20%) Amazon Redshift
14 11 (2.20%) RDBMS
15 9 (1.80%) Apache Iceberg
16 8 (1.60%) KDB
16 8 (1.60%) Kdb+
Development Applications
1 268 (53.60%) Selenium
2 263 (52.60%) JIRA
3 260 (52.00%) Maven
4 259 (51.80%) GitLab
5 258 (51.60%) Cucumber
6 251 (50.20%) Bitbucket
6 251 (50.20%) SonarQube
7 248 (49.60%) Sonatype Nexus
8 38 (7.60%) Jenkins
9 28 (5.60%) JUnit
10 25 (5.00%) Git
11 14 (2.80%) Mockito
12 9 (1.80%) Robot Framework
12 9 (1.80%) Snyk
13 6 (1.20%) Postman
14 5 (1.00%) Subversion
14 5 (1.00%) TestNG
15 3 (0.60%) Cypress.io
15 3 (0.60%) Gradle
15 3 (0.60%) TeamCity
General
1 357 (71.40%) Finance
2 323 (64.60%) Inclusion and Diversity
3 301 (60.20%) Banking
4 107 (21.40%) Investment Banking
5 90 (18.00%) Corporate Banking
5 90 (18.00%) Retail
6 84 (16.80%) Law
7 51 (10.20%) Social Skills
8 25 (5.00%) Public Sector
9 20 (4.00%) Marketing
10 19 (3.80%) Analytical Skills
11 11 (2.20%) Aerospace
12 6 (1.20%) Legal
13 5 (1.00%) Manufacturing
14 4 (0.80%) Advertising
14 4 (0.80%) Games
14 4 (0.80%) Private Banking
14 4 (0.80%) Publishing
14 4 (0.80%) Tech for Good
14 4 (0.80%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 348 (69.60%) Software Engineer
2 70 (14.00%) Java Engineer
3 61 (12.20%) Developer
4 60 (12.00%) Java Software Engineer
5 49 (9.80%) Lead
6 48 (9.60%) Java Developer
7 36 (7.20%) Senior
8 26 (5.20%) Architect
9 25 (5.00%) Lead Software Engineer
10 24 (4.80%) Full-Stack Engineer
11 19 (3.80%) Python Engineer
12 18 (3.60%) Full-Stack Software Engineer
12 18 (3.60%) Senior Software Engineer
13 17 (3.40%) Lead Java Engineer
13 17 (3.40%) Senior Developer
14 16 (3.20%) Senior Java Developer
15 14 (2.80%) Data Engineer
15 14 (2.80%) Python Software Engineer
16 13 (2.60%) AWS Engineer
17 12 (2.40%) Kafka Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 358 (71.60%) Spring
2 340 (68.00%) Spring Boot
3 320 (64.00%) React
4 258 (51.60%) CSS
5 257 (51.40%) HTML
6 250 (50.00%) Redux
7 248 (49.60%) JPA
8 176 (35.20%) Hibernate
9 131 (26.20%) RESTful
10 125 (25.00%) REST
11 93 (18.60%) HTML5
12 92 (18.40%) Jest
13 90 (18.00%) CSS3
13 90 (18.00%) Sass
14 34 (6.80%) AngularJS
15 31 (6.20%) RabbitMQ
16 22 (4.40%) .NET
17 13 (2.60%) Apache NiFi
18 12 (2.40%) Node.js
19 11 (2.20%) gRPC
Miscellaneous
1 273 (54.60%) Product Ownership
2 252 (50.40%) Enterprise Software
3 62 (12.40%) Cloud Native
4 26 (5.20%) Distributed Systems
5 22 (4.40%) Algorithms
6 12 (2.40%) Data Structures
7 10 (2.00%) Public Cloud
8 9 (1.80%) Low-Code
8 9 (1.80%) Management Information System
9 8 (1.60%) Reference Data
10 6 (1.20%) Wiki
11 5 (1.00%) Legacy Code
11 5 (1.00%) Life Science
12 4 (0.80%) Credit Risk
12 4 (0.80%) Derivative
12 4 (0.80%) Distributed Applications
12 4 (0.80%) Fixed Income
12 4 (0.80%) Legacy Systems
12 4 (0.80%) Onboarding
12 4 (0.80%) Team-Oriented Environment
Operating Systems
1 13 (2.60%) Linux
2 6 (1.20%) Unix
3 1 (0.20%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 1 (0.20%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 428 (85.60%) Agile
2 381 (76.20%) Software Engineering
3 378 (75.60%) CI/CD
4 349 (69.80%) Microservices
5 323 (64.60%) SDLC
6 310 (62.00%) DevOps
7 293 (58.60%) Full-Stack Development
8 285 (57.00%) Test Automation
9 278 (55.60%) Containerisation
10 256 (51.20%) Front End Development
11 254 (50.80%) Performance Optimisation
12 195 (39.00%) Continuous Improvement
13 193 (38.60%) TDD
14 164 (32.80%) Clean Code
15 132 (26.40%) Mentoring
16 113 (22.60%) User Experience
17 93 (18.60%) Migration
18 91 (18.20%) Responsive Web Design
18 91 (18.20%) Strategic Thinking
19 61 (12.20%) Artificial Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 415 (83.00%) Java
2 325 (65.00%) SQL
3 284 (56.80%) JavaScript
4 123 (24.60%) TypeScript
5 65 (13.00%) Python
6 36 (7.20%) C#
7 6 (1.20%) Go
8 5 (1.00%) Bash
8 5 (1.00%) C++
8 5 (1.00%) Groovy
8 5 (1.00%) R
9 3 (0.60%) PROC SQL
10 2 (0.40%) MATLAB
10 2 (0.40%) Scala
10 2 (0.40%) T-SQL
11 1 (0.20%) C
11 1 (0.20%) Ruby
11 1 (0.20%) Rust
11 1 (0.20%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 36 (7.20%) Security Cleared
2 29 (5.80%) SC Cleared
3 24 (4.80%) AWS Certification
4 21 (4.20%) Degree
5 16 (3.20%) Computer Science Degree
6 10 (2.00%) Azure Certification
7 7 (1.40%) DV Cleared
7 7 (1.40%) Master's Degree
8 5 (1.00%) CISSP
9 4 (0.80%) AWS Certified Developer
10 3 (0.60%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 3 (0.60%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 253 (50.60%) QA
2 90 (18.00%) Accessibility
3 13 (2.60%) GDPR
4 11 (2.20%) Def Stans
5 10 (2.00%) Data Quality
6 7 (1.40%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 4 (0.80%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 4 (0.80%) SOC 2
8 3 (0.60%) HIPAA
9 2 (0.40%) PCI DSS
10 1 (0.20%) Actionable Recommendations
10 1 (0.20%) Government Security Classifications
10 1 (0.20%) NIST
10 1 (0.20%) RMADS
System Software
1 324 (64.80%) Docker
2 7 (1.40%) VMware Infrastructure
3 5 (1.00%) HDFS
4 3 (0.60%) Apache Flume
Systems Management
1 340 (68.00%) Kubernetes
2 33 (6.60%) Terraform
3 19 (3.80%) Ansible
4 5 (1.00%) Grafana
4 5 (1.00%) Kibana
4 5 (1.00%) Kustomize
4 5 (1.00%) Packer
5 3 (0.60%) logstash
5 3 (0.60%) Oozie
5 3 (0.60%) Prometheus
6 1 (0.20%) Istio
6 1 (0.20%) Kubeflow
6 1 (0.20%) Podman
6 1 (0.20%) Progress Chef
6 1 (0.20%) Puppet
Vendors
1 246 (49.20%) Solace
2 38 (7.60%) Oracle
3 25 (5.00%) VMware
4 18 (3.60%) Databricks
5 13 (2.60%) Google
6 10 (2.00%) Splunk
7 9 (1.80%) BiZZdesign
7 9 (1.80%) Black Duck
7 9 (1.80%) UiPath
8 7 (1.40%) Microsoft
9 6 (1.20%) Red Hat
9 6 (1.20%) Sybase
10 4 (0.80%) Bloomberg
10 4 (0.80%) Blue Prism
10 4 (0.80%) Coverity
10 4 (0.80%) SAP
11 3 (0.60%) Informatica
11 3 (0.60%) MicroStrategy
12 2 (0.40%) IBM
12 2 (0.40%) Salesforce