Complete salary ranges for DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineers in London — including cloud platform premiums, MLOps specialist pay, and Kubernetes certification value.
Last updated: April 2026 | Source: 200,000+ UK job listings
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| Level | London range | National median |
|---|---|---|
| Junior DevOps (0–2 yrs) | £38,000–£52,000 | £30,000–£44,000 |
| Mid DevOps (3–5 yrs) | £68,000–£90,000 | £54,000–£72,000 |
| Senior DevOps (6–9 yrs) | £90,000–£120,000 | £72,000–£96,000 |
| SRE (mid-senior) | £85,000–£118,000 | £68,000–£95,000 |
| Platform Engineer (senior) | £95,000–£125,000 | £75,000–£100,000 |
| Head of DevOps / Infrastructure | £120,000–£170,000 | £95,000–£135,000 |
| Skill / Certification | Salary premium | Demand trend |
|---|---|---|
| MLOps / AI infrastructure | +£16,000–£22,000 | +38% demand |
| Kubernetes (CKA certified) | +£10,000–£14,000 | +15% demand |
| Terraform / IaC expertise | +£8,000–£12,000 | +18% demand |
| AWS Solutions Architect | +£9,000–£13,000 | +4% demand |
| Go / Python scripting | +£7,000–£10,000 | +12% demand |
| Legacy Jenkins / on-premise | −£5,000 | −22% demand |
In 2026, the lines between DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering have blurred significantly, but salary differences remain meaningful. Site Reliability Engineers — particularly those at large tech companies — command the highest base salaries due to the on-call requirements and production system ownership. Platform engineers sit slightly below SREs but above traditional DevOps roles, reflecting the shift towards internal developer tooling as a product discipline.
MLOps engineers — those who manage ML infrastructure, model deployment pipelines, and AI system reliability — now command the highest premiums in the infrastructure space, reflecting the surge in enterprise AI deployment and the scarcity of engineers who understand both ML workflows and production infrastructure.
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