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 27 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
27 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 450 190 271
Rank change year-on-year -260 +81 -7
Permanent jobs citing Kafka 126 507 730
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK excluding London 0.19% 1.79% 1.03%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 2.38% 10.66% 5.27%
Number of salaries quoted 82 157 314
10th Percentile £53,750 £50,000 £42,500
25th Percentile £59,500 £57,500 £51,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £72,500 £70,000 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year +3.57% +16.67% -11.11%
75th Percentile £94,688 £92,500 £77,750
90th Percentile £97,500 £106,500 £91,250
UK median annual salary £95,000 £82,500 £77,500
% change year-on-year +15.15% +6.45% -13.89%

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 5,294 4,758 13,853
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 7.87% 16.80% 19.50%
Number of salaries quoted 4,199 3,046 10,401
10th Percentile £35,000 £32,500 £33,750
25th Percentile £46,250 £46,250 £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 £73,750 £68,750
90th Percentile £88,750 £87,500 £80,000
UK median annual salary £65,000 £66,253 £60,000
% change year-on-year -1.89% +10.42% -11.11%

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 27 May 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 27 May 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 -142 48 £80,000 +11.13% 30
South East -54 43 £67,500 -6.90% 26
North West -101 34 £80,000 +14.29% 21
Yorkshire -46 11 £70,000 -12.50% 6
Midlands -93 11 £87,500 +25.00% 5
South West -75 10 £75,000 +11.11% 12
East of England -38 9 £67,500 -5.59% 3
West Midlands -58 9 £87,500 +12.90% 3
Scotland -79 5 £65,000 -3.70% 4
Wales - 4 £55,000 - 2
North East -41 3 - - 3
East Midlands -74 2 £71,500 +5.93% 2
Northern Ireland -49 1 - - 8
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 16 (12.70%) Apache Airflow
1 16 (12.70%) Apache Spark
2 9 (7.14%) Apache
2 9 (7.14%) OpenStack
3 2 (1.59%) Apache Qpid
3 2 (1.59%) CICS
4 1 (0.79%) Camunda
4 1 (0.79%) PegaRULES
Cloud Services
1 87 (69.05%) AWS
2 53 (42.06%) Azure
3 35 (27.78%) GCP
4 31 (24.60%) Serverless
5 19 (15.08%) Amazon S3
6 18 (14.29%) Amazon ECS
7 16 (12.70%) Amazon EKS
7 16 (12.70%) Amazon SQS
8 15 (11.90%) AWS Lambda
9 14 (11.11%) Snowflake
10 13 (10.32%) AWS CloudFormation
10 13 (10.32%) dbt
11 12 (9.52%) GitHub
12 10 (7.94%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 8 (6.35%) Power Platform
14 7 (5.56%) Amazon EventBridge
14 7 (5.56%) Azure Synapse Analytics
14 7 (5.56%) Datadog
15 6 (4.76%) Azure DevOps
16 5 (3.97%) Amazon Kinesis
Communications & Networking
1 13 (10.32%) MQTT
2 3 (2.38%) Network Security
3 2 (1.59%) Firewall
3 2 (1.59%) HTTP
3 2 (1.59%) SSL
4 1 (0.79%) AMQP
4 1 (0.79%) Broadband
4 1 (0.79%) Radio Access Network
Database & Business Intelligence
1 27 (21.43%) NoSQL
2 20 (15.87%) PostgreSQL
3 19 (15.08%) MongoDB
4 18 (14.29%) Data Lake
5 14 (11.11%) Elasticsearch
5 14 (11.11%) SQL Server
6 13 (10.32%) Data Warehouse
6 13 (10.32%) Relational Database
7 11 (8.73%) Amazon Redshift
8 10 (7.94%) Looker
9 9 (7.14%) BigQuery
9 9 (7.14%) DynamoDB
10 8 (6.35%) Power BI
10 8 (6.35%) Tableau
11 7 (5.56%) Amazon RDS
11 7 (5.56%) Flink
11 7 (5.56%) Redis
11 7 (5.56%) Snowflake Schema
12 5 (3.97%) Big Data
12 5 (3.97%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 34 (26.98%) Git
2 20 (15.87%) Jenkins
3 11 (8.73%) GitLab
4 9 (7.14%) JIRA
5 8 (6.35%) JUnit
6 7 (5.56%) MLflow
7 4 (3.17%) Cucumber
7 4 (3.17%) IntelliJ
7 4 (3.17%) SonarQube
8 3 (2.38%) Eclipse
8 3 (2.38%) JMeter
9 2 (1.59%) Postman
9 2 (1.59%) Selenium
10 1 (0.79%) Claude Code
10 1 (0.79%) Karma Test Runner
10 1 (0.79%) REST Assured
10 1 (0.79%) Robot Framework
10 1 (0.79%) TeamCity
10 1 (0.79%) TestNG
10 1 (0.79%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 20 (15.87%) Social Skills
2 15 (11.90%) Finance
3 13 (10.32%) Analytical Skills
4 4 (3.17%) Advertising
4 4 (3.17%) Public Sector
5 2 (1.59%) Banking
5 2 (1.59%) Games
5 2 (1.59%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 2 (1.59%) Law
6 1 (0.79%) Aerospace
6 1 (0.79%) Automotive
6 1 (0.79%) Marketing
6 1 (0.79%) Organisational Skills
6 1 (0.79%) Retail
6 1 (0.79%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 34 (26.98%) Developer
2 29 (23.02%) Senior
3 26 (20.63%) Data Engineer
4 20 (15.87%) Java Developer
5 18 (14.29%) Architect
6 16 (12.70%) Lead
7 9 (7.14%) Full-Stack Developer
7 9 (7.14%) Senior Data Engineer
8 8 (6.35%) Senior Systems Engineer
9 7 (5.56%) Backend Developer
9 7 (5.56%) DevSecOps Engineer
9 7 (5.56%) Full-Stack Java Developer
9 7 (5.56%) Integration Developer
9 7 (5.56%) Integration Engineer
9 7 (5.56%) Lead Developer
9 7 (5.56%) Senior Developer
9 7 (5.56%) Systems Engineer
10 6 (4.76%) Java Engineer
10 6 (4.76%) Principal Engineer
10 6 (4.76%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 36 (28.57%) REST
2 33 (26.19%) Spring
3 30 (23.81%) Spring Boot
4 19 (15.08%) Node.js
5 18 (14.29%) RESTful
6 16 (12.70%) React
7 13 (10.32%) Elastic Stack
7 13 (10.32%) RabbitMQ
8 11 (8.73%) .NET
9 9 (7.14%) Mustache
10 8 (6.35%) AngularJS
10 8 (6.35%) gRPC
10 8 (6.35%) Middleware
10 8 (6.35%) PySpark
10 8 (6.35%) SOAP
10 8 (6.35%) Web Services
11 7 (5.56%) JWT
11 7 (5.56%) OpenTelemetry
11 7 (5.56%) scikit-learn
11 7 (5.56%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 41 (32.54%) Distributed Systems
2 28 (22.22%) Cloud Native
3 14 (11.11%) Product Ownership
4 8 (6.35%) Public Cloud
5 7 (5.56%) Clustering
5 7 (5.56%) Onboarding
6 5 (3.97%) Robotics
7 4 (3.17%) Replication
8 3 (2.38%) Distributed Computing
8 3 (2.38%) Team-Oriented Environment
9 2 (1.59%) Data Structures
9 2 (1.59%) Enterprise Software
9 2 (1.59%) Greenfield Project
9 2 (1.59%) Hybrid Cloud
9 2 (1.59%) Mainframe
10 1 (0.79%) Anti-Piracy
10 1 (0.79%) IoT
10 1 (0.79%) NHS
10 1 (0.79%) Social Media
10 1 (0.79%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 9 (7.14%) Linux
2 1 (0.79%) Android
2 1 (0.79%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 72 (57.14%) CI/CD
2 67 (53.17%) Agile
3 66 (52.38%) Microservices
4 44 (34.92%) Event-Driven
5 41 (32.54%) DevOps
6 37 (29.37%) AI
7 36 (28.57%) Containerisation
7 36 (28.57%) Observability
8 32 (25.40%) Infrastructure as Code
9 31 (24.60%) Analytics
9 31 (24.60%) Data Modelling
10 29 (23.02%) Data Pipeline
10 29 (23.02%) Scrum
11 28 (22.22%) Machine Learning
12 26 (20.63%) Continuous Improvement
12 26 (20.63%) Mentoring
13 23 (18.25%) Test Automation
14 20 (15.87%) Data Engineering
14 20 (15.87%) ETL
15 18 (14.29%) Data Science
Programming Languages
1 73 (57.94%) Python
2 61 (48.41%) SQL
3 58 (46.03%) Java
4 33 (26.19%) JavaScript
5 21 (16.67%) TypeScript
6 13 (10.32%) Rust
7 11 (8.73%) C#
8 7 (5.56%) Scala
9 6 (4.76%) Groovy
10 5 (3.97%) Go
10 5 (3.97%) T-SQL
11 3 (2.38%) PL/SQL
11 3 (2.38%) PowerShell
12 2 (1.59%) Bicep
12 2 (1.59%) C++
12 2 (1.59%) Kotlin
13 1 (0.79%) C
13 1 (0.79%) Embedded C
13 1 (0.79%) Embedded C++
13 1 (0.79%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 22 (17.46%) Security Cleared
2 18 (14.29%) Degree
3 16 (12.70%) SC Cleared
4 10 (7.94%) Computer Science Degree
5 4 (3.17%) DV Cleared
6 1 (0.79%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
6 1 (0.79%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 16 (12.70%) Data Quality
2 10 (7.94%) QA
3 7 (5.56%) California Consumer Privacy Act
3 7 (5.56%) GDPR
4 1 (0.79%) Accessibility
System Software
1 50 (39.68%) Docker
Systems Management
1 57 (45.24%) Kubernetes
2 39 (30.95%) Terraform
3 13 (10.32%) Ansible
4 11 (8.73%) Grafana
5 9 (7.14%) Prometheus
6 6 (4.76%) Puppet
7 5 (3.97%) Kibana
8 4 (3.17%) Podman
9 2 (1.59%) Progress Chef
10 1 (0.79%) HP Fortify
Vendors
1 17 (13.49%) Databricks
2 15 (11.90%) Microsoft
3 10 (7.94%) Oracle
4 7 (5.56%) Cloudera
4 7 (5.56%) Dell
4 7 (5.56%) HubSpot
5 5 (3.97%) Pega
6 4 (3.17%) NVIDIA
6 4 (3.17%) Splunk
7 3 (2.38%) Confluent
7 3 (2.38%) Google
7 3 (2.38%) Tenable
8 1 (0.79%) Atlassian
8 1 (0.79%) Automation Anywhere
8 1 (0.79%) IBM
8 1 (0.79%) Informatica
8 1 (0.79%) OpenAI
8 1 (0.79%) Rollbar
8 1 (0.79%) ServiceNow
8 1 (0.79%) UiPath