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

6 months to
18 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 458 199 269
Rank change year-on-year -259 +70 +52
Permanent jobs citing Kafka 180 531 655
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK excluding London 0.25% 1.57% 0.93%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 2.91% 10.43% 5.06%
Number of salaries quoted 132 138 295
10th Percentile £53,856 £44,625 £42,500
25th Percentile £61,250 £52,500 £45,494
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £72,000 £67,500 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year +6.67% +17.39% -17.86%
75th Percentile £90,313 £78,750 £73,125
90th Percentile £97,500 £97,500 £91,250
UK median annual salary £85,000 £82,500 £72,500
% change year-on-year +3.03% +13.79% -17.14%

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 6,175 5,089 12,938
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 8.59% 15.06% 18.29%
Number of salaries quoted 4,964 3,217 9,516
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 £73,000 £68,750
90th Percentile £90,000 £85,000 £80,000
UK median annual salary £65,000 £67,000 £60,000
% change year-on-year -2.99% +11.67% -10.45%

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 18 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 18 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 -155 54 £75,000 +11.11% 35
South East -55 48 £67,500 -6.25% 43
North West -86 46 £75,000 +11.11% 13
South West -69 22 £85,000 +30.77% 19
Midlands -86 18 £85,000 +25.93% 9
Wales - 17 £70,000 - 3
West Midlands -35 16 £86,250 +43.75% 6
East of England -14 15 £72,500 +1.40% 6
Scotland -83 9 £65,000 +4.00% 11
Yorkshire -38 4 £66,805 -23.65% 12
North East -55 4 £62,500 +31.58% 10
East Midlands -55 2 £71,500 +5.93% 3
Northern Ireland -74 1 - - 1
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 21 (11.67%) Apache Spark
2 17 (9.44%) Apache Airflow
3 11 (6.11%) Apache
4 2 (1.11%) Anypoint
4 2 (1.11%) ArcGIS
4 2 (1.11%) BizTalk Server
4 2 (1.11%) CICS
5 1 (0.56%) Apache Qpid
5 1 (0.56%) Camunda
5 1 (0.56%) Confluence
5 1 (0.56%) OpenStack
5 1 (0.56%) PegaRULES
Cloud Services
1 120 (66.67%) AWS
2 93 (51.67%) Azure
3 55 (30.56%) GCP
4 33 (18.33%) Serverless
5 27 (15.00%) GitHub
6 25 (13.89%) AWS CloudFormation
7 23 (12.78%) AWS Lambda
8 21 (11.67%) Amazon SQS
9 16 (8.89%) Snowflake
10 15 (8.33%) Amazon EventBridge
10 15 (8.33%) Amazon S3
11 13 (7.22%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 13 (7.22%) dbt
12 12 (6.67%) GitHub Copilot
13 11 (6.11%) Amazon ECS
14 10 (5.56%) Amazon EKS
14 10 (5.56%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 9 (5.00%) Azure DevOps
15 9 (5.00%) Power Platform
16 8 (4.44%) Datadog
Communications & Networking
1 21 (11.67%) MQTT
2 3 (1.67%) Network Security
3 2 (1.11%) Firewall
3 2 (1.11%) SSL
4 1 (0.56%) AMQP
4 1 (0.56%) ATM
4 1 (0.56%) Broadband
4 1 (0.56%) Radio Access Network
Database & Business Intelligence
1 37 (20.56%) MongoDB
2 32 (17.78%) PostgreSQL
3 31 (17.22%) NoSQL
4 20 (11.11%) SQL Server
5 18 (10.00%) Elasticsearch
5 18 (10.00%) MySQL
6 17 (9.44%) Data Lake
7 13 (7.22%) Data Warehouse
8 12 (6.67%) Amazon Redshift
8 12 (6.67%) Relational Database
9 11 (6.11%) Big Data
9 11 (6.11%) Redis
10 10 (5.56%) Looker
11 9 (5.00%) DynamoDB
11 9 (5.00%) Flink
11 9 (5.00%) Power BI
12 8 (4.44%) BigQuery
13 7 (3.89%) Amazon RDS
13 7 (3.89%) Snowflake Schema
13 7 (3.89%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 39 (21.67%) Git
2 19 (10.56%) Jenkins
3 17 (9.44%) GitLab
4 7 (3.89%) JIRA
4 7 (3.89%) MLflow
5 4 (2.22%) Atlassian Bamboo
5 4 (2.22%) Bitbucket
5 4 (2.22%) IntelliJ
5 4 (2.22%) JUnit
6 3 (1.67%) Eclipse
6 3 (1.67%) Postman
6 3 (1.67%) Selenium
6 3 (1.67%) SonarQube
7 2 (1.11%) Cucumber
7 2 (1.11%) JMeter
8 1 (0.56%) minitest
8 1 (0.56%) Mockito
8 1 (0.56%) RSpec
8 1 (0.56%) TeamCity
8 1 (0.56%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 31 (17.22%) Social Skills
2 26 (14.44%) Analytical Skills
3 21 (11.67%) Public Sector
4 16 (8.89%) Finance
5 6 (3.33%) Banking
6 4 (2.22%) Advertising
7 3 (1.67%) Aerospace
7 3 (1.67%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 3 (1.67%) Law
8 2 (1.11%) Automotive
8 2 (1.11%) Manufacturing
8 2 (1.11%) Telecoms
9 1 (0.56%) Billing
9 1 (0.56%) Documentation Skills
9 1 (0.56%) Games
9 1 (0.56%) Italian Language
9 1 (0.56%) Japanese Language
9 1 (0.56%) Marketing
9 1 (0.56%) Retail
9 1 (0.56%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 50 (27.78%) Developer
2 46 (25.56%) Senior
3 39 (21.67%) Data Engineer
4 28 (15.56%) Lead
5 23 (12.78%) Java Developer
6 22 (12.22%) Architect
7 18 (10.00%) Senior Data Engineer
8 14 (7.78%) Senior Developer
9 12 (6.67%) Full-Stack Developer
9 12 (6.67%) Software Engineer
10 9 (5.00%) Backend Developer
10 9 (5.00%) DevOps Engineer
10 9 (5.00%) Integration Developer
10 9 (5.00%) Principal Engineer
11 8 (4.44%) Full-Stack Java Developer
11 8 (4.44%) Integration Engineer
11 8 (4.44%) Senior Systems Engineer
12 7 (3.89%) Kafka Engineer
12 7 (3.89%) Lead Developer
12 7 (3.89%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 47 (26.11%) Spring
2 46 (25.56%) Spring Boot
3 39 (21.67%) RESTful
4 37 (20.56%) REST
5 30 (16.67%) RabbitMQ
6 22 (12.22%) Hibernate
7 21 (11.67%) JPA
7 21 (11.67%) Node.js
8 15 (8.33%) React
9 14 (7.78%) .NET
10 13 (7.22%) PySpark
11 10 (5.56%) FastAPI
11 10 (5.56%) OpenAPI
11 10 (5.56%) Swagger
12 9 (5.00%) JWT
12 9 (5.00%) OAuth
12 9 (5.00%) PyTorch
12 9 (5.00%) scikit-learn
12 9 (5.00%) TensorFlow
13 8 (4.44%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 53 (29.44%) Cloud Native
2 43 (23.89%) Distributed Systems
3 20 (11.11%) Product Ownership
4 10 (5.56%) Onboarding
4 10 (5.56%) Public Cloud
5 8 (4.44%) Enterprise Software
5 8 (4.44%) Hybrid Cloud
5 8 (4.44%) Mainframe
6 7 (3.89%) Clustering
6 7 (3.89%) Legacy Systems
6 7 (3.89%) Robotics
7 5 (2.78%) Self-Motivation
8 4 (2.22%) Data Structures
8 4 (2.22%) Marketing Technology
8 4 (2.22%) Replication
8 4 (2.22%) Virtual Team
9 3 (1.67%) Distributed Computing
9 3 (1.67%) Greenfield Project
9 3 (1.67%) Team-Oriented Environment
10 2 (1.11%) AI Agents
Operating Systems
1 19 (10.56%) Linux
2 2 (1.11%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 100 (55.56%) CI/CD
2 89 (49.44%) Agile
3 83 (46.11%) Microservices
4 73 (40.56%) DevOps
5 62 (34.44%) Event-Driven
6 53 (29.44%) AI
7 51 (28.33%) Containerisation
7 51 (28.33%) Observability
8 50 (27.78%) Infrastructure as Code
9 46 (25.56%) Analytics
10 42 (23.33%) Data Pipeline
11 41 (22.78%) Mentoring
12 40 (22.22%) Machine Learning
13 39 (21.67%) Continuous Improvement
14 37 (20.56%) Problem-Solving
14 37 (20.56%) Scrum
14 37 (20.56%) Software Engineering
15 32 (17.78%) Data Modelling
16 30 (16.67%) ETL
17 29 (16.11%) Data Engineering
Programming Languages
1 102 (56.67%) Python
2 83 (46.11%) Java
3 77 (42.78%) SQL
4 29 (16.11%) JavaScript
5 21 (11.67%) TypeScript
6 14 (7.78%) Rust
7 11 (6.11%) C#
8 10 (5.56%) Go
8 10 (5.56%) PowerShell
9 9 (5.00%) Scala
10 7 (3.89%) Ruby
11 6 (3.33%) Groovy
11 6 (3.33%) Kotlin
12 5 (2.78%) Bash
12 5 (2.78%) T-SQL
13 4 (2.22%) C++
14 3 (1.67%) PL/SQL
15 2 (1.11%) Bicep
15 2 (1.11%) C
15 2 (1.11%) DataWeave
Qualifications
1 40 (22.22%) Security Cleared
2 28 (15.56%) SC Cleared
3 27 (15.00%) Degree
4 15 (8.33%) Computer Science Degree
5 10 (5.56%) DV Cleared
6 7 (3.89%) Azure Certification
7 5 (2.78%) Master's Degree
8 4 (2.22%) MBA
9 1 (0.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 1 (0.56%) BPSS Clearance
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 21 (11.67%) Data Quality
2 15 (8.33%) QA
3 9 (5.00%) GDPR
4 7 (3.89%) Accessibility
4 7 (3.89%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 6 (3.33%) WCAG
6 2 (1.11%) SOC 2
7 1 (0.56%) NIST
7 1 (0.56%) NIST 800
7 1 (0.56%) PCI DSS
7 1 (0.56%) PSD2
System Software
1 71 (39.44%) Docker
Systems Management
1 84 (46.67%) Kubernetes
2 59 (32.78%) Terraform
3 17 (9.44%) Grafana
4 16 (8.89%) Ansible
5 14 (7.78%) Prometheus
6 6 (3.33%) Puppet
7 5 (2.78%) Kibana
8 4 (2.22%) Argo
8 4 (2.22%) Podman
9 2 (1.11%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 20 (11.11%) Databricks
2 19 (10.56%) Microsoft
3 9 (5.00%) Google
3 9 (5.00%) Oracle
3 9 (5.00%) Splunk
4 8 (4.44%) Dell
5 7 (3.89%) Cloudera
5 7 (3.89%) HubSpot
6 5 (2.78%) Atlassian
6 5 (2.78%) OpenAI
7 4 (2.22%) Adobe
7 4 (2.22%) Confluent
7 4 (2.22%) Dynatrace
7 4 (2.22%) Informatica
7 4 (2.22%) NVIDIA
7 4 (2.22%) Pega
8 3 (1.67%) MuleSoft
8 3 (1.67%) Tenable
9 2 (1.11%) webMethods
10 1 (0.56%) Yahoo!