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

6 months to
20 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 445 198 255
Rank change year-on-year -247 +57 +36
Permanent jobs citing Kafka 213 509 569
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK excluding London 0.27% 1.47% 0.96%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 2.93% 10.09% 5.10%
Number of salaries quoted 151 127 240
10th Percentile £53,750 £43,750 £42,500
25th Percentile £61,813 £52,500 £44,738
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £72,500 £67,500 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year +7.41% +17.39% -17.86%
75th Percentile £85,000 £78,750 £70,313
90th Percentile £97,500 £97,500 £87,500
UK median annual salary £82,500 £82,500 £70,000
% 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 7,264 5,044 11,150
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 9.27% 14.54% 18.72%
Number of salaries quoted 5,708 3,144 7,588
10th Percentile £38,750 £32,500 £35,000
25th Percentile £47,500 £43,938 £43,750
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £60,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year - +9.09% -8.33%
75th Percentile £75,000 £73,750 £70,000
90th Percentile £91,375 £86,250 £80,000
UK median annual salary £67,500 £67,500 £62,783
% change year-on-year - +7.51% -6.99%

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 20 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 20 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 -129 65 £75,000 +11.88% 66
North West -93 49 £75,000 +11.49% 34
South East -55 46 £67,500 -6.90% 63
South West -71 33 £85,000 +30.77% 25
Midlands -75 21 £85,000 +25.93% 20
Wales - 21 £70,000 - 3
West Midlands -38 19 £85,000 +41.67% 15
East of England -19 18 £72,500 +1.40% 9
Scotland -84 15 £65,000 +4.00% 24
North East -54 11 £65,000 +36.84% 14
Yorkshire -34 5 £72,653 -3.13% 18
East Midlands -66 2 £71,500 +5.93% 5
Northern Ireland -93 1 - - 11
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 31 (14.55%) Apache Spark
2 18 (8.45%) Apache
2 18 (8.45%) Apache Airflow
3 3 (1.41%) Anypoint
3 3 (1.41%) BizTalk Server
4 2 (0.94%) ArcGIS
4 2 (0.94%) CICS
4 2 (0.94%) Confluence
5 1 (0.47%) JBoss
5 1 (0.47%) OpenStack
5 1 (0.47%) PegaRULES
5 1 (0.47%) WebLogic
Business Applications
1 1 (0.47%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 139 (65.26%) AWS
2 114 (53.52%) Azure
3 62 (29.11%) GCP
4 37 (17.37%) Serverless
5 33 (15.49%) GitHub
6 30 (14.08%) AWS CloudFormation
7 25 (11.74%) Amazon SQS
7 25 (11.74%) AWS Lambda
8 18 (8.45%) Amazon S3
9 17 (7.98%) Amazon ECS
10 16 (7.51%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 16 (7.51%) Amazon EventBridge
10 16 (7.51%) Snowflake
11 14 (6.57%) GitHub Copilot
12 13 (6.10%) dbt
13 11 (5.16%) Azure DevOps
13 11 (5.16%) Azure Service Bus
13 11 (5.16%) Datadog
14 10 (4.69%) Amazon EKS
14 10 (4.69%) Azure Data Factory
Communications & Networking
1 24 (11.27%) MQTT
2 5 (2.35%) Network Security
3 2 (0.94%) Firewall
3 2 (0.94%) SSL
4 1 (0.47%) ATM
4 1 (0.47%) LAN
4 1 (0.47%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 47 (22.07%) MongoDB
2 39 (18.31%) PostgreSQL
3 34 (15.96%) NoSQL
4 24 (11.27%) MySQL
5 22 (10.33%) SQL Server
6 19 (8.92%) Elasticsearch
7 18 (8.45%) Data Lake
8 16 (7.51%) Relational Database
9 15 (7.04%) Flink
10 14 (6.57%) Big Data
10 14 (6.57%) Data Warehouse
11 12 (5.63%) Amazon Redshift
12 10 (4.69%) DynamoDB
12 10 (4.69%) Power BI
12 10 (4.69%) Redis
13 9 (4.23%) BigQuery
13 9 (4.23%) Looker
14 8 (3.76%) Amazon RDS
14 8 (3.76%) Tableau
15 7 (3.29%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 50 (23.47%) Git
2 24 (11.27%) Jenkins
3 22 (10.33%) GitLab
4 8 (3.76%) JIRA
5 7 (3.29%) MLflow
6 4 (1.88%) Atlassian Bamboo
6 4 (1.88%) Bitbucket
6 4 (1.88%) IntelliJ
6 4 (1.88%) JUnit
7 3 (1.41%) Eclipse
7 3 (1.41%) Postman
7 3 (1.41%) Selenium
7 3 (1.41%) SonarQube
8 2 (0.94%) Cucumber
8 2 (0.94%) JMeter
8 2 (0.94%) minitest
8 2 (0.94%) RSpec
9 1 (0.47%) ERwin
9 1 (0.47%) Mockito
9 1 (0.47%) TeamCity
General
1 32 (15.02%) Analytical Skills
2 31 (14.55%) Social Skills
3 27 (12.68%) Public Sector
4 23 (10.80%) Finance
5 10 (4.69%) Banking
5 10 (4.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 7 (3.29%) Law
7 4 (1.88%) Advertising
7 4 (1.88%) Aerospace
7 4 (1.88%) Marketing
8 2 (0.94%) Automotive
8 2 (0.94%) Games
8 2 (0.94%) Manufacturing
9 1 (0.47%) Billing
9 1 (0.47%) Financial Institution
9 1 (0.47%) Italian Language
9 1 (0.47%) Japanese Language
9 1 (0.47%) Military
9 1 (0.47%) Retail
9 1 (0.47%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 62 (29.11%) Developer
2 52 (24.41%) Senior
3 49 (23.00%) Data Engineer
4 34 (15.96%) Lead
5 27 (12.68%) Java Developer
6 25 (11.74%) Architect
7 20 (9.39%) Senior Data Engineer
8 17 (7.98%) Software Engineer
9 16 (7.51%) Senior Developer
10 13 (6.10%) Full-Stack Developer
11 12 (5.63%) Kafka Engineer
12 10 (4.69%) DevOps Engineer
12 10 (4.69%) Integration Developer
12 10 (4.69%) Principal Engineer
12 10 (4.69%) Python Developer
12 10 (4.69%) Python Engineer
13 9 (4.23%) Backend Developer
13 9 (4.23%) Full-Stack Java Developer
14 8 (3.76%) Integration Engineer
14 8 (3.76%) Java Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 67 (31.46%) Terraform
2 56 (26.29%) Spring
3 53 (24.88%) Spring Boot
4 52 (24.41%) RESTful
5 43 (20.19%) RabbitMQ
5 43 (20.19%) REST
6 27 (12.68%) Hibernate
7 26 (12.21%) JPA
8 24 (11.27%) Node.js
9 17 (7.98%) .NET
9 17 (7.98%) React
10 16 (7.51%) PySpark
11 15 (7.04%) FastAPI
11 15 (7.04%) OpenAPI
11 15 (7.04%) Swagger
12 12 (5.63%) Apache NiFi
13 10 (4.69%) JWT
13 10 (4.69%) Keycloak
13 10 (4.69%) OAuth
14 9 (4.23%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 68 (31.92%) Cloud Native
2 54 (25.35%) Distributed Systems
3 24 (11.27%) Product Ownership
4 13 (6.10%) Enterprise Software
5 12 (5.63%) Hybrid Cloud
6 11 (5.16%) Public Cloud
7 10 (4.69%) Onboarding
8 8 (3.76%) Distributed Computing
8 8 (3.76%) Mainframe
8 8 (3.76%) Self-Motivation
9 7 (3.29%) Clustering
9 7 (3.29%) Legacy Systems
9 7 (3.29%) Robotics
9 7 (3.29%) Virtual Team
10 6 (2.82%) Data Structures
11 5 (2.35%) AI Agents
11 5 (2.35%) Algorithms
11 5 (2.35%) Greenfield Project
12 4 (1.88%) IoT
12 4 (1.88%) Marketing Technology
Operating Systems
1 22 (10.33%) Linux
2 4 (1.88%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 121 (56.81%) CI/CD
2 100 (46.95%) Agile
3 96 (45.07%) Microservices
4 92 (43.19%) DevOps
5 75 (35.21%) Event-Driven
6 67 (31.46%) Infrastructure as Code
7 62 (29.11%) AI
8 61 (28.64%) Containerisation
9 57 (26.76%) Software Engineering
10 53 (24.88%) Data Pipeline
10 53 (24.88%) Observability
11 52 (24.41%) Analytics
11 52 (24.41%) Mentoring
12 48 (22.54%) Problem-Solving
13 43 (20.19%) Machine Learning
14 40 (18.78%) ETL
15 39 (18.31%) Data Modelling
15 39 (18.31%) Scrum
16 36 (16.90%) Continuous Improvement
17 35 (16.43%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 118 (55.40%) Python
2 103 (48.36%) Java
3 79 (37.09%) SQL
4 31 (14.55%) JavaScript
5 22 (10.33%) TypeScript
6 14 (6.57%) Go
7 12 (5.63%) C#
8 11 (5.16%) Rust
9 10 (4.69%) PowerShell
10 8 (3.76%) Groovy
10 8 (3.76%) Ruby
10 8 (3.76%) Scala
11 6 (2.82%) Kotlin
12 5 (2.35%) Bash
12 5 (2.35%) T-SQL
13 3 (1.41%) C++
13 3 (1.41%) DataWeave
13 3 (1.41%) PL/SQL
14 2 (0.94%) Bicep
14 2 (0.94%) C
Qualifications
1 54 (25.35%) Security Cleared
2 34 (15.96%) SC Cleared
3 27 (12.68%) Degree
4 17 (7.98%) Computer Science Degree
5 15 (7.04%) DV Cleared
6 13 (6.10%) Azure Certification
7 6 (2.82%) AWS Certification
8 5 (2.35%) Master's Degree
9 4 (1.88%) MBA
10 3 (1.41%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 2 (0.94%) BPSS Clearance
11 2 (0.94%) TOGAF Certification
12 1 (0.47%) HND
12 1 (0.47%) OCP
12 1 (0.47%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 25 (11.74%) Data Quality
2 18 (8.45%) QA
3 10 (4.69%) GDPR
4 8 (3.76%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 7 (3.29%) Accessibility
6 6 (2.82%) WCAG
7 3 (1.41%) NIST
7 3 (1.41%) NIST 800
8 2 (0.94%) SOC 2
9 1 (0.47%) HIPAA
9 1 (0.47%) PCI DSS
9 1 (0.47%) PSD2
System Software
1 86 (40.38%) Docker
2 1 (0.47%) Hyper-V
Systems Management
1 100 (46.95%) Kubernetes
2 21 (9.86%) Grafana
3 18 (8.45%) Ansible
4 17 (7.98%) Prometheus
5 7 (3.29%) Argo
5 7 (3.29%) Puppet
6 5 (2.35%) Kibana
6 5 (2.35%) Podman
7 2 (0.94%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 24 (11.27%) Databricks
2 20 (9.39%) Microsoft
3 16 (7.51%) Splunk
4 10 (4.69%) Dynatrace
4 10 (4.69%) Google
5 9 (4.23%) Oracle
6 8 (3.76%) Dell
7 7 (3.29%) Atlassian
7 7 (3.29%) Cloudera
7 7 (3.29%) HubSpot
7 7 (3.29%) OpenAI
8 5 (2.35%) MuleSoft
9 4 (1.88%) Adobe
9 4 (1.88%) Confluent
9 4 (1.88%) Informatica
9 4 (1.88%) NVIDIA
10 3 (1.41%) Pega
10 3 (1.41%) Tenable
10 3 (1.41%) webMethods
11 2 (0.94%) Sparx