Shocking Cloud-Native Job Market Trend: Why Junior Roles Are So Rare

If you are looking for a Junior-level cloud-native role, there’s good and bad news for you.

The good news is that there have been twice as many Junior cloud-native roles so far in 2025, when compared to 2024 or even 2023.

The not-so-good news, however, is that while these roles have increased exponentially in recent years, they still don’t make up more than 3-4% of all cloud-native roles.

How has this happened? What is the most sought-after experience level for most of the cloud-native roles? And where are we headed with this trend?

We’ll try to find answers to these questions (and perhaps more) by analyzing job data for cloud-native roles. To do so, we’ll use Kube Careers job market trend reports, which are some of the industry’s most dense datasets.

What is the Current Frequency of Junior Roles in the Cloud-Native Domain?

Of all the jobs published by Kube Careers in Q3 2025, only 2.95% were Junior-level, a staggering 66.9% required Senior-level experience, 10% were Lead-level positions, and 7.8% were Mid-level roles.

These were followed by Architect (5.3%), Principal (4.1%), and C-level (2.75%) positions.

To put things further into context, for every 22 Senior roles published, only 1 Junior role exists. Or for every 3 Mid-level positions, you have just a single junior position. Interesting, isn’t it?

Is This a One-Off? Or Has this Been a Trend Through the Previous Quarters as Well?

No, and Yes.

If we compare the year-on-year numbers, it gets worse for junior roles.

Here are the highlights from the comparison:

• For Q3 2024, there were only 1.43% Junior roles compared to the current representation of 2.95% jobs in Q3 2025.
• This means that even after doubling over a span of a year, junior positions still make up less than 3% of the total jobs published in a quarter.

Where Are We Headed With This? Will We See More Junior Roles in the Cloud Native Space Soon?

To answer these questions, let’s go back in time.

Here, we have traced the percentage of Junior positions published for each quarter since Q3 2023, a span of two years or eight quarters.

If we look at the data for junior roles in the past two years, we find that:

• Junior roles have increased multi-fold since the minuscule representation in 2024 and 2023, yet the current frequency of junior roles still sits below 4% in 2025.
• If we are to project based on the trend for the previous quarters, we should see the overall representation for Junior roles rise to 5-6% of the total jobs published in a quarter.

Summary

• If you are looking for a Junior role in the cloud-native space, understand that the frequency of these roles is low at 3-4%. However, the future seems promising, and we expect the number to grow to at least 5-6% by the end of 2025.
• If you are a recruiter, perhaps you could tell us why there is such a disparity for Junior roles? We are all ears!

What do you think is the reason for such a low frequency of Junior roles in the cloud-native realm? What has your experience been in finding junior vacancies? Let us know.