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 11 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
11 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 434 203 276
Rank change year-on-year -231 +73 +3
Permanent jobs citing Kafka 230 494 479
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK excluding London 0.28% 1.43% 0.86%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 3.14% 10.46% 4.48%
Number of salaries quoted 162 115 208
10th Percentile £53,856 £43,750 -
25th Percentile £62,407 £51,875 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £72,500 £67,500 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +7.41% +22.73% -21.43%
75th Percentile £85,000 £83,125 £67,500
90th Percentile £97,500 £98,250 £84,125
UK median annual salary £80,000 £82,500 £70,000
% change year-on-year -3.03% +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 7,333 4,725 10,685
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 8.82% 13.66% 19.12%
Number of salaries quoted 5,731 2,855 6,572
10th Percentile £38,772 £33,750 £36,250
25th Percentile £47,500 £45,000 £44,738
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £60,000 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year - +4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £76,075 £73,750 £70,000
90th Percentile £92,500 £86,250 £81,250
UK median annual salary £67,500 £70,000 £65,000
% change year-on-year -3.57% +7.69% -3.70%

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 11 September 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 11 September 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 -114 73 £75,000 +7.14% 72
North West -92 55 £75,000 +7.14% 36
South East -58 44 £67,500 -4.59% 57
South West -74 36 £85,000 +25.93% 29
Midlands -84 29 £85,000 +25.93% 11
West Midlands -31 27 £85,000 +51.11% 9
Wales - 24 £70,000 - 3
East of England -29 21 £72,500 -4.29% 9
North East -50 12 £67,500 +42.11% 8
Scotland -83 12 - - 35
Yorkshire -49 6 £78,500 +4.67% 28
East Midlands -72 2 £71,500 +5.93% 2
Northern Ireland -89 1 - - 14
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 28 (12.17%) Apache Spark
2 18 (7.83%) Apache
3 14 (6.09%) Apache Airflow
4 3 (1.30%) Anypoint
4 3 (1.30%) BizTalk Server
4 3 (1.30%) OpenStack
5 2 (0.87%) ArcGIS
5 2 (0.87%) Confluence
6 1 (0.43%) JBoss
6 1 (0.43%) WebLogic
Business Applications
1 1 (0.43%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 147 (63.91%) AWS
2 117 (50.87%) Azure
3 59 (25.65%) GCP
4 39 (16.96%) Serverless
5 34 (14.78%) AWS CloudFormation
6 30 (13.04%) GitHub
7 27 (11.74%) Amazon SQS
7 27 (11.74%) AWS Lambda
8 21 (9.13%) Amazon S3
9 19 (8.26%) Amazon ECS
10 17 (7.39%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 16 (6.96%) Amazon EventBridge
12 14 (6.09%) Azure Service Bus
13 13 (5.65%) Azure Data Factory
13 13 (5.65%) Snowflake
14 12 (5.22%) Amazon EKS
14 12 (5.22%) GitHub Copilot
15 11 (4.78%) Datadog
16 9 (3.91%) dbt
16 9 (3.91%) GitHub Actions
Communications & Networking
1 26 (11.30%) MQTT
2 5 (2.17%) Network Security
3 2 (0.87%) 4G
3 2 (0.87%) 5G
3 2 (0.87%) DNS
3 2 (0.87%) HTTP
3 2 (0.87%) SSH
3 2 (0.87%) TCP/IP
4 1 (0.43%) ATM
4 1 (0.43%) Firewall
4 1 (0.43%) Internet
4 1 (0.43%) LAN
4 1 (0.43%) SSL
4 1 (0.43%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 57 (24.78%) MongoDB
2 47 (20.43%) PostgreSQL
3 43 (18.70%) NoSQL
4 29 (12.61%) MySQL
5 20 (8.70%) SQL Server
6 19 (8.26%) Elasticsearch
7 16 (6.96%) Data Lake
8 14 (6.09%) Big Data
8 14 (6.09%) Flink
8 14 (6.09%) Relational Database
9 12 (5.22%) Redis
10 11 (4.78%) Data Warehouse
11 10 (4.35%) Amazon Redshift
11 10 (4.35%) DynamoDB
12 8 (3.48%) Amazon RDS
12 8 (3.48%) Power BI
13 7 (3.04%) BigQuery
14 6 (2.61%) Looker
14 6 (2.61%) Tableau
15 5 (2.17%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 53 (23.04%) Git
2 25 (10.87%) GitLab
3 21 (9.13%) Jenkins
4 8 (3.48%) JIRA
5 5 (2.17%) MLflow
5 5 (2.17%) Selenium
6 4 (1.74%) Atlassian Bamboo
6 4 (1.74%) Bitbucket
6 4 (1.74%) JUnit
7 3 (1.30%) Postman
7 3 (1.30%) SonarQube
8 2 (0.87%) Cucumber
8 2 (0.87%) JMeter
8 2 (0.87%) minitest
8 2 (0.87%) RSpec
9 1 (0.43%) ERwin
9 1 (0.43%) IntelliJ
9 1 (0.43%) Maven
9 1 (0.43%) Mockito
9 1 (0.43%) TeamCity
General
1 35 (15.22%) Analytical Skills
2 33 (14.35%) Public Sector
2 33 (14.35%) Social Skills
3 23 (10.00%) Finance
4 14 (6.09%) Banking
5 11 (4.78%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 7 (3.04%) Law
7 5 (2.17%) Games
8 4 (1.74%) Advertising
8 4 (1.74%) Aerospace
8 4 (1.74%) Marketing
8 4 (1.74%) Publishing
9 3 (1.30%) iGaming
9 3 (1.30%) Telecoms
10 2 (0.87%) Automotive
10 2 (0.87%) Manufacturing
11 1 (0.43%) Billing
11 1 (0.43%) Financial Institution
11 1 (0.43%) Military
11 1 (0.43%) Retail
Job Titles
1 75 (32.61%) Developer
2 71 (30.87%) Senior
3 50 (21.74%) Data Engineer
4 36 (15.65%) Lead
5 33 (14.35%) Java Developer
6 29 (12.61%) Senior Developer
7 25 (10.87%) Architect
8 23 (10.00%) Senior Data Engineer
9 21 (9.13%) Software Engineer
10 15 (6.52%) Kafka Engineer
10 15 (6.52%) Python Developer
11 13 (5.65%) Python Engineer
12 12 (5.22%) Backend Developer
12 12 (5.22%) Senior Python Developer
13 10 (4.35%) Azure Engineer
13 10 (4.35%) Elasticsearch Engineer
13 10 (4.35%) Integration Developer
13 10 (4.35%) Java Engineer
13 10 (4.35%) Principal Engineer
13 10 (4.35%) Python Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 69 (30.00%) Spring
1 69 (30.00%) Terraform
2 66 (28.70%) Spring Boot
3 59 (25.65%) RESTful
4 55 (23.91%) RabbitMQ
5 46 (20.00%) REST
6 30 (13.04%) Hibernate
7 29 (12.61%) Node.js
8 28 (12.17%) JPA
9 20 (8.70%) FastAPI
10 19 (8.26%) React
11 18 (7.83%) OpenAPI
11 18 (7.83%) Swagger
12 17 (7.39%) .NET
13 16 (6.96%) PySpark
14 13 (5.65%) Keycloak
15 12 (5.22%) Apache NiFi
16 10 (4.35%) JWT
16 10 (4.35%) OAuth
17 8 (3.48%) Ruby on Rails
Miscellaneous
1 75 (32.61%) Cloud Native
2 57 (24.78%) Distributed Systems
3 31 (13.48%) Product Ownership
4 17 (7.39%) Enterprise Software
5 15 (6.52%) Hybrid Cloud
6 12 (5.22%) Self-Motivation
7 11 (4.78%) Virtual Team
8 10 (4.35%) Onboarding
9 9 (3.91%) Public Cloud
10 8 (3.48%) Distributed Computing
11 7 (3.04%) Greenfield Project
11 7 (3.04%) Legacy Systems
11 7 (3.04%) Robotics
12 6 (2.61%) Data Structures
12 6 (2.61%) Mainframe
13 5 (2.17%) AI Agents
13 5 (2.17%) Algorithms
13 5 (2.17%) Clustering
13 5 (2.17%) IoT
14 4 (1.74%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 24 (10.43%) Linux
2 4 (1.74%) Windows
3 1 (0.43%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 128 (55.65%) CI/CD
2 111 (48.26%) Agile
3 102 (44.35%) DevOps
3 102 (44.35%) Microservices
4 93 (40.43%) Event-Driven
5 74 (32.17%) Infrastructure as Code
6 72 (31.30%) Containerisation
7 71 (30.87%) Software Engineering
8 65 (28.26%) Mentoring
9 62 (26.96%) AI
10 59 (25.65%) Observability
11 54 (23.48%) Problem-Solving
12 52 (22.61%) Data Pipeline
13 49 (21.30%) Analytics
14 43 (18.70%) Scrum
15 42 (18.26%) Roadmaps
15 42 (18.26%) Technical Leadership
16 41 (17.83%) Continuous Improvement
17 40 (17.39%) API Design
17 40 (17.39%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 119 (51.74%) Python
2 113 (49.13%) Java
3 75 (32.61%) SQL
4 31 (13.48%) JavaScript
4 31 (13.48%) TypeScript
5 17 (7.39%) Go
6 12 (5.22%) C#
7 10 (4.35%) PowerShell
7 10 (4.35%) Rust
8 8 (3.48%) Groovy
8 8 (3.48%) Ruby
8 8 (3.48%) Scala
9 7 (3.04%) Bash
10 6 (2.61%) Kotlin
11 5 (2.17%) T-SQL
12 4 (1.74%) Shell Script
13 3 (1.30%) C++
13 3 (1.30%) DataWeave
14 2 (0.87%) Bicep
14 2 (0.87%) C
Qualifications
1 61 (26.52%) Security Cleared
2 41 (17.83%) SC Cleared
3 26 (11.30%) Degree
4 18 (7.83%) DV Cleared
5 17 (7.39%) Computer Science Degree
6 16 (6.96%) Azure Certification
7 6 (2.61%) AWS Certification
7 6 (2.61%) BPSS Clearance
8 5 (2.17%) Master's Degree
9 4 (1.74%) MBA
10 3 (1.30%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 2 (0.87%) TOGAF Certification
12 1 (0.43%) HND
12 1 (0.43%) OCP
12 1 (0.43%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 24 (10.43%) QA
2 23 (10.00%) Data Quality
3 8 (3.48%) GDPR
4 7 (3.04%) Accessibility
5 6 (2.61%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 6 (2.61%) WCAG
6 3 (1.30%) NIST
6 3 (1.30%) NIST 800
7 2 (0.87%) SOC 2
8 1 (0.43%) HIPAA
8 1 (0.43%) PCI DSS
8 1 (0.43%) PSD2
System Software
1 94 (40.87%) Docker
2 1 (0.43%) Hyper-V
Systems Management
1 109 (47.39%) Kubernetes
2 26 (11.30%) Grafana
3 22 (9.57%) Prometheus
4 16 (6.96%) Ansible
5 7 (3.04%) Argo
6 6 (2.61%) Puppet
7 5 (2.17%) Kibana
7 5 (2.17%) Podman
8 1 (0.43%) Progress Chef
8 1 (0.43%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 21 (9.13%) Databricks
2 20 (8.70%) Microsoft
2 20 (8.70%) Splunk
3 11 (4.78%) Dynatrace
4 9 (3.91%) Google
5 8 (3.48%) Oracle
6 7 (3.04%) Atlassian
6 7 (3.04%) HubSpot
6 7 (3.04%) OpenAI
7 6 (2.61%) Dell
8 5 (2.17%) Cloudera
8 5 (2.17%) MuleSoft
9 4 (1.74%) Adobe
9 4 (1.74%) Confluent
9 4 (1.74%) Informatica
9 4 (1.74%) NVIDIA
10 3 (1.30%) Tenable
10 3 (1.30%) webMethods
11 2 (0.87%) Sparx
12 1 (0.43%) YouTube