The state of Kubernetes jobs in 2025 Q1

Published in May 2025

What is the average salary for a Kubernetes engineer in 2025? What about comparable DevOps, Platform, and SRE salaries?

Has 2025 brought new demands for skillsets in the Kubernetes job market?

With the resurgence of In-office work policies, have remote and hybrid jobs dipped drastically?

Answers to all the above questions (and plenty more you may have) in our State of the Kubernetes job market report for Q1 2025.

During the first quarter of 2025, we gathered over 1,200 job postings, carefully sifting through them to analyze and categorize 436 job descriptions that:

Require Kubernetes experience.
Mention a clear salary range.
Are listed by companies (and not recruitment agencies).

Do consider the above factors while looking at the numbers.

Let's begin!

You can also download the full report here:

Kubernetes Job market trends for Q1 2025

This quarter's report has been brought to you by Fairwinds — Fairwinds gives your team a secure, reliable Kubernetes platform on the cloud provider of your choice.

How much does a Kubernetes job pay in Q1 2025?

For Q1 2025, a Kubernetes job pays a minimum average of $133,221 and a maximum average of $183,680.

This brings the average Kubernetes job salary to $158,450 globally.

Please note that these numbers aren't indicative of the trend, as we have converted all the salaries in our dataset (regardless of location) into USD.

To get a more accurate view of the salaries, we must look at them according to the geography.

But first, let's look at the frequency of Kubernetes jobs based on geography.

Where are most of the Kubernetes job offers located?

In North America, and that too by a huge margin.

In Q1 2025, a staggering 70.8% of the jobs we published were from the North American region.

European job offers came in at a distant second, with only 18.8% of the jobs published from that region.

At the bottom tier of Kubernetes jobs frequency were South East Asia (4%), Latin America (3%), and the Pacific area, with 2% representation.

Year-on-year, North American jobs have risen by 6% while European jobs have declined by 4%.

The same decline is reflected in Q1 2025 for Latin American, Pacific, and South East Asian jobs (though the frequency of these jobs is lower, to begin with).

What's the average Kubernetes salary in North America?

For the first quarter of 2025, the average minimum salary for North American Kubernetes jobs is $138,723, while the maximum average is $191,853, bringing the average salary to $165,288.

What's interesting is that year over year, the minimum average salary has decreased by 6.11%, the maximum average by 6.93%, and the average wage by 6.58% from the numbers in Q1 2024.

What could be the reason for this decline? We don't know. The data from the remaining quarters for 2025 will give us a clearer picture.

If we break down the average salaries into ranges, we get a clearer view of the trend:

The key takeaways from the distribution are:

85% of North American Kubernetes jobs pay between $100,000 and $240,000, 8.33% pay below $100,000, and 4% pay between $200,000 and $300,000 annually.
What's also interesting to note is how just 1.26% of the jobs pay an average salary above $300,000.

However, the ranges were higher for the same quarter in 2024

Here are the most important bits from the year-on-year comparison:

North American jobs paying less than $100,000 almost doubled to 8.33% in Q1 2025, up from a measly 4.21% in Q1 2024.
In Q1 2024, we had 2.5% more jobs paying between $100,000 and $240,000 and 1.2% more paying between $240,000 and $300,000.

Again, we'll need to analyze at least another quarter of 2025 to understand why North American salaries may have declined.

What is the average Kubernetes salary in Europe?

For Q1 2025, the average European salaries start with a minimum salary of €61,455, a maximum of €80,939, and a mean salary of €71,197.

What's good to see is that European salaries have increased year-on-year!

Compared to Q1 2024, the minimum average salary has increased by 4.7% (was €58,691), the maximum average by 3.5% (was €78,161), and the mean by 4.04% (was €68,426).

Let's break down European salaries further to get a clearer picture

For the first quarter of 2025, 37.50% of the European jobs pay below €60,0008, 56.25% pay between €60,000 to €120,000, and 6.25% pay above €120,000.

European salaries were distributed almost similarly in Q1 2024 as well

There are two key differences between the two quarters:

Q1 2024 had 4% more jobs, with an average salary of less than 60,000.
Jobs paying an average salary between 120,000 to 200,000 almost doubled in Q1 2025.

There is a catch, however. Even though our European dataset now consists of twice as many jobs as before, we can't ignore the fact that we have converted all the European salaries to Euros; further deviation needs to be made to obtain better results since Europe is a vast and diverse continent with countries with varied economics, cost of living, and technological status.

Look out for more granular insights in the future as we expand our European dataset.

The Kubernetes job market seeks Software Engineers, Platform and DevOps Engineers.

Of all the jobs we published in Q1 2025, 47% were Software Engineer positions.

Platform Engineer, DevOps Engineer and Site Reliability Engineer positions were the next popular roles with 11%, 9% and 4% representation.

These were followed by _Machine Learning Engineer, Data Engineer, DevSecOps Engineer, and Engineering Manager positions, each accounting for less than 4% of the total jobs in Q1 2025.

Software engineer positions were the most popular title in Q1 2024 as well, but as for other job titles, the trend was slightly different.

The key points to note in the year-on-year comparison are:

While Q1 2025 had 3.5% more Software Engineer positions, it also had almost double the Platform Engineer roles when compared to Q1 2024.
While the percentage of DevOps Engineer positions has stayed almost the same, SRE, Data Engineer, and Engineering manager positions have nearly halved in a year.
At the same time, Machine Learning Engineer positions have almost grown by 180% year-on-year.

68% of all the Kubernetes jobs allow remote work of some sort!

Of all the jobs we published in Q1 2025, 68.6% of these allow some sort of remote work.

However, remote mentions don't equal fully remote work!

More than 60% of the jobs that mention remote work require the selected candidate to work remotely, although only within a specified geography (for example, within the United States).

For Q1 2025, 60.5% of the remote jobs require the selected candidate to work remotely within a specified geography, mainly within the country. 38.1% allow for Hybrid work, meaning the employee should arrive at the office at a specified frequency.

Only 0.7% of the jobs were remote without any restrictions, while the same percentage of jobs were restricted within a specific timezone

In-office work may not be heading to a resurrection, or so it seems

We've traced all the working modes data, right from Q1 2023 to get a better understanding of the trends:

From Q1 2023 to Q4 2024, remote jobs plunged 11%, but they now make up 42% of the total jobs in Q1 2025. We may be seeing more remote jobs this year. Only time will tell.
What's also interesting is that In-Office jobs averaged 30% from Q1 2023 to Q3 2024 but then shot up by 10% in Q4 2024. However, In-office roles declined by 9% from Q4 2024 to Q1 2025, now making up 31% of the total jobs.
It's good to see that Hybrid jobs have averaged 30% since the start of 2024, suggesting consistency.

Kubernetes jobs with on-call rota

Not all job descriptions explicitly mention the requirement for the employee to be on call (they should, ideally).

For Q1 2025, only 11% of the jobs mentioned a need to be on-call, yet we can't exclude that the number is higher.

Most on-call mentions were for remote and hybrid jobs.

Of all the jobs that mentioned an on-call requirement, 56% were remote jobs, 30% were Hybrid jobs, and 14% were jobs from the office.

Popular technologies for Kubernetes jobs

Note that every job description mentions more than one technology.

For the first quarter of 2025, Docker is the most popular technology for Kubernetes jobs, with 57% of the total jobs mentioning it.

Distant from the first yet closer together are PostgreSQL and Kafka, with 21% and 15% representation.

Completing the top 5 popular technologies are Helm and MySQL with 13% and 12% of the jobs mentioning it.

Year on Year, things weren't so different after all

Although not much has changed year-on-year, here are the noteworthy differences:

Docker has become popular by 7% now in Q1 2025, while Helm has almost doubled in popularity in 2025 so far.
Otherwise, the change for the most popular technologies has been between 2-3% at most, which is negligible.

Which programming languages are in demand the most for Kubernetes jobs?

For the first quarter of 2025, a stagerring 62% of the jobs mentioned a need for Python experience. Note that multiple programming languages were mentioned in most job descriptions.

The next popular languages were Java (37%), Javascript (36%), and Go (32%).

Other languages completing the top ten list are Shell 21%, Typescript 17%, C# 13%, C++ 13%, GraphQL 5% and Rust 5%.

Since Q1 2024, however, there have been a few changes in popularity for programming languages

Let's discuss the key changes in programming language trends:

Python's dominance grew by 5% year-on-year to 62% in the first quarter of 2025. At the same time, Javascript grew in popularity by a whopping 8% in a year. At the same time, the popularity of Shell and Typescript grew by 4% each in four quarters.
Ruby is taking the hit for popularity then, dropping by almost 50% (from it's previous representation) in Q1 2025.

In hindsight, if you wish to land your next Kubernetes job, it would help if you know Python or any of Java, Go, or Javascript.

What CI/CD tools are popular in Kubernetes job descriptions?

Of the jobs that cited CI/CD experience in Q1 2025, a staggering 50% were generic mentions with no tool specification.

Of the total specific tags for CI/CD tools in Q1 2025, Jenkins was the most popular, with 38% of the total tags.

A close second was Gitlab, with 25% representation, and Github Actions was a distant third, with 12% representation.

CircleCI followed these at 7%, Azure DevOps at 5%, and TeamCity at 2%.

Observability adoption in Kubernetes

In Q1 2025, Grafana was the most popular tool, with 23% of the total mentions.

A close second but a distant third were Prometheus and Datadog with 21% and 11% representation.

Other notable tools are ELK 6%, New Relic 5%, Splunk 4%, and Loki 3%.

Summary

Hopefully, you learned all the skills/tools and expertise companies seek when hiring a Kubernetes Engineer.

For those interested in a comprehensive analysis, the full report is available for download here.

We'd love to hear your feedback.

You can reach us at [email protected].