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 2 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
2 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 437 209 249
Rank change year-on-year -228 +40 +60
Permanent jobs citing Kafka 200 516 591
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK excluding London 0.27% 1.50% 0.99%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 3.09% 10.39% 5.67%
Number of salaries quoted 145 130 250
10th Percentile £54,173 £43,750 £42,500
25th Percentile £61,250 £52,500 £44,738
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £71,500 £67,500 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year +5.93% +17.39% -17.86%
75th Percentile £87,500 £78,438 £71,250
90th Percentile £97,500 £97,500 £87,500
UK median annual salary £85,000 £82,500 £70,000
% change year-on-year +3.03% +17.86% -19.48%

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 6,467 4,967 10,425
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 8.62% 14.45% 17.39%
Number of salaries quoted 5,149 3,108 7,402
10th Percentile £37,500 £32,500 £35,000
25th Percentile £46,250 £43,750 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £60,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year - +9.09% -4.35%
75th Percentile £74,066 £73,750 £68,750
90th Percentile £90,000 £85,210 £80,000
UK median annual salary £65,000 £67,500 £61,500
% change year-on-year -3.70% +9.76% -8.89%

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 2 August 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 2 August 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 -138 60 £75,000 +11.49% 44
South East -51 48 £67,500 -6.90% 47
North West -93 47 £75,000 +11.11% 19
South West -67 30 £85,000 +30.77% 24
Midlands -81 19 £85,000 +25.93% 7
Wales - 19 £70,000 - 1
West Midlands -49 17 £85,000 +41.67% 6
East of England -24 16 £72,500 +1.40% 6
Scotland -83 12 £65,000 +4.00% 20
North East -50 9 £65,000 +36.84% 7
Yorkshire -38 4 £66,805 -10.93% 18
East Midlands -69 2 £71,500 +5.93% 1
Northern Ireland -86 1 - - 12
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 27 (13.50%) Apache Spark
2 19 (9.50%) Apache Airflow
3 15 (7.50%) Apache
4 3 (1.50%) Anypoint
4 3 (1.50%) BizTalk Server
5 2 (1.00%) ArcGIS
5 2 (1.00%) CICS
5 2 (1.00%) Confluence
6 1 (0.50%) JBoss
6 1 (0.50%) OpenStack
6 1 (0.50%) PegaRULES
6 1 (0.50%) WebLogic
Cloud Services
1 132 (66.00%) AWS
2 103 (51.50%) Azure
3 60 (30.00%) GCP
4 36 (18.00%) Serverless
5 31 (15.50%) GitHub
6 26 (13.00%) AWS CloudFormation
7 25 (12.50%) Amazon SQS
8 24 (12.00%) AWS Lambda
9 17 (8.50%) Amazon S3
9 17 (8.50%) Snowflake
10 16 (8.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 16 (8.00%) Amazon ECS
10 16 (8.00%) Amazon EventBridge
11 15 (7.50%) dbt
12 13 (6.50%) GitHub Copilot
13 12 (6.00%) Amazon EKS
14 11 (5.50%) Azure DevOps
15 10 (5.00%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 10 (5.00%) Datadog
16 9 (4.50%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 23 (11.50%) MQTT
2 4 (2.00%) Network Security
3 2 (1.00%) Firewall
3 2 (1.00%) SSL
4 1 (0.50%) ATM
4 1 (0.50%) Broadband
4 1 (0.50%) LAN
4 1 (0.50%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 44 (22.00%) MongoDB
2 36 (18.00%) PostgreSQL
3 32 (16.00%) NoSQL
4 21 (10.50%) MySQL
4 21 (10.50%) SQL Server
5 19 (9.50%) Elasticsearch
6 17 (8.50%) Data Lake
7 14 (7.00%) Flink
7 14 (7.00%) Relational Database
8 13 (6.50%) Big Data
8 13 (6.50%) Data Warehouse
9 12 (6.00%) Amazon Redshift
10 11 (5.50%) Redis
11 10 (5.00%) BigQuery
11 10 (5.00%) Looker
12 9 (4.50%) DynamoDB
12 9 (4.50%) Power BI
13 7 (3.50%) Amazon RDS
13 7 (3.50%) Snowflake Schema
13 7 (3.50%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 46 (23.00%) Git
2 23 (11.50%) GitLab
2 23 (11.50%) Jenkins
3 8 (4.00%) JIRA
4 7 (3.50%) MLflow
5 4 (2.00%) Atlassian Bamboo
5 4 (2.00%) Bitbucket
5 4 (2.00%) IntelliJ
5 4 (2.00%) JUnit
6 3 (1.50%) Eclipse
6 3 (1.50%) Postman
6 3 (1.50%) Selenium
6 3 (1.50%) SonarQube
7 2 (1.00%) Cucumber
7 2 (1.00%) JMeter
7 2 (1.00%) minitest
7 2 (1.00%) RSpec
8 1 (0.50%) Mockito
8 1 (0.50%) TeamCity
8 1 (0.50%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 33 (16.50%) Social Skills
2 30 (15.00%) Analytical Skills
3 24 (12.00%) Public Sector
4 20 (10.00%) Finance
5 7 (3.50%) Banking
5 7 (3.50%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 5 (2.50%) Law
7 4 (2.00%) Advertising
8 3 (1.50%) Aerospace
9 2 (1.00%) Automotive
9 2 (1.00%) Manufacturing
9 2 (1.00%) Marketing
10 1 (0.50%) Billing
10 1 (0.50%) Documentation Skills
10 1 (0.50%) Games
10 1 (0.50%) Italian Language
10 1 (0.50%) Japanese Language
10 1 (0.50%) Retail
10 1 (0.50%) Retail Banking
10 1 (0.50%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 56 (28.00%) Developer
2 49 (24.50%) Senior
3 48 (24.00%) Data Engineer
4 32 (16.00%) Lead
5 25 (12.50%) Java Developer
6 22 (11.00%) Architect
7 19 (9.50%) Senior Data Engineer
8 16 (8.00%) Senior Developer
9 15 (7.50%) Software Engineer
10 13 (6.50%) Full-Stack Developer
11 10 (5.00%) DevOps Engineer
11 10 (5.00%) Integration Developer
11 10 (5.00%) Kafka Engineer
12 9 (4.50%) Full-Stack Java Developer
12 9 (4.50%) Principal Engineer
13 8 (4.00%) Backend Developer
13 8 (4.00%) Integration Engineer
13 8 (4.00%) Python Developer
13 8 (4.00%) Senior Systems Engineer
14 7 (3.50%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 50 (25.00%) Spring
2 49 (24.50%) Spring Boot
3 45 (22.50%) RESTful
4 40 (20.00%) REST
5 35 (17.50%) RabbitMQ
6 24 (12.00%) Hibernate
7 23 (11.50%) JPA
7 23 (11.50%) Node.js
8 16 (8.00%) React
9 15 (7.50%) .NET
9 15 (7.50%) PySpark
10 12 (6.00%) FastAPI
10 12 (6.00%) OpenAPI
10 12 (6.00%) Swagger
11 10 (5.00%) Apache NiFi
11 10 (5.00%) JWT
11 10 (5.00%) OAuth
12 9 (4.50%) PyTorch
12 9 (4.50%) scikit-learn
12 9 (4.50%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 59 (29.50%) Cloud Native
2 46 (23.00%) Distributed Systems
3 23 (11.50%) Product Ownership
4 11 (5.50%) Enterprise Software
4 11 (5.50%) Public Cloud
5 10 (5.00%) Hybrid Cloud
5 10 (5.00%) Onboarding
6 8 (4.00%) Mainframe
7 7 (3.50%) Clustering
7 7 (3.50%) Legacy Systems
7 7 (3.50%) Robotics
8 6 (3.00%) Data Structures
8 6 (3.00%) Distributed Computing
8 6 (3.00%) Self-Motivation
9 5 (2.50%) Greenfield Project
9 5 (2.50%) Virtual Team
10 4 (2.00%) Algorithms
10 4 (2.00%) IoT
10 4 (2.00%) Marketing Technology
10 4 (2.00%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 21 (10.50%) Linux
2 3 (1.50%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 113 (56.50%) CI/CD
2 98 (49.00%) Agile
3 88 (44.00%) Microservices
4 84 (42.00%) DevOps
5 67 (33.50%) Event-Driven
6 60 (30.00%) AI
6 60 (30.00%) Infrastructure as Code
7 55 (27.50%) Containerisation
8 52 (26.00%) Observability
9 51 (25.50%) Analytics
9 51 (25.50%) Data Pipeline
10 48 (24.00%) Mentoring
11 46 (23.00%) Software Engineering
12 43 (21.50%) Problem-Solving
13 42 (21.00%) Machine Learning
14 39 (19.50%) Scrum
15 37 (18.50%) Continuous Improvement
16 36 (18.00%) Data Modelling
16 36 (18.00%) ETL
17 33 (16.50%) Data Engineering
Programming Languages
1 113 (56.50%) Python
2 94 (47.00%) Java
3 80 (40.00%) SQL
4 33 (16.50%) JavaScript
5 23 (11.50%) TypeScript
6 13 (6.50%) Rust
7 11 (5.50%) C#
7 11 (5.50%) Go
8 10 (5.00%) PowerShell
9 9 (4.50%) Scala
10 8 (4.00%) Groovy
10 8 (4.00%) Ruby
11 6 (3.00%) Kotlin
12 5 (2.50%) Bash
12 5 (2.50%) T-SQL
13 4 (2.00%) C++
14 3 (1.50%) DataWeave
14 3 (1.50%) PL/SQL
15 2 (1.00%) Bicep
15 2 (1.00%) C
Qualifications
1 50 (25.00%) Security Cleared
2 33 (16.50%) SC Cleared
3 28 (14.00%) Degree
4 16 (8.00%) Computer Science Degree
5 13 (6.50%) DV Cleared
6 10 (5.00%) Azure Certification
7 4 (2.00%) AWS Certification
7 4 (2.00%) Master's Degree
7 4 (2.00%) MBA
8 2 (1.00%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 2 (1.00%) BPSS Clearance
9 1 (0.50%) HND
9 1 (0.50%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 25 (12.50%) Data Quality
2 18 (9.00%) QA
3 9 (4.50%) GDPR
4 7 (3.50%) Accessibility
4 7 (3.50%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 6 (3.00%) WCAG
6 2 (1.00%) NIST
6 2 (1.00%) NIST 800
6 2 (1.00%) SOC 2
7 1 (0.50%) PCI DSS
7 1 (0.50%) PSD2
System Software
1 81 (40.50%) Docker
2 1 (0.50%) Hyper-V
Systems Management
1 95 (47.50%) Kubernetes
2 66 (33.00%) Terraform
3 19 (9.50%) Ansible
3 19 (9.50%) Grafana
4 16 (8.00%) Prometheus
5 7 (3.50%) Puppet
6 6 (3.00%) Argo
7 5 (2.50%) Kibana
7 5 (2.50%) Podman
8 2 (1.00%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 23 (11.50%) Databricks
2 20 (10.00%) Microsoft
3 12 (6.00%) Splunk
4 11 (5.50%) Google
5 8 (4.00%) Dell
5 8 (4.00%) Dynatrace
5 8 (4.00%) Oracle
6 7 (3.50%) Atlassian
6 7 (3.50%) Cloudera
6 7 (3.50%) HubSpot
7 6 (3.00%) Confluent
8 5 (2.50%) MuleSoft
8 5 (2.50%) OpenAI
9 4 (2.00%) Adobe
9 4 (2.00%) Informatica
9 4 (2.00%) NVIDIA
10 3 (1.50%) Pega
10 3 (1.50%) Tenable
10 3 (1.50%) webMethods
11 1 (0.50%) Yahoo!