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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Development Operations Engineer

💰 $ - $

EngineeringDevOpsCloudSREIT

🎯 Role Definition

The Development Operations Engineer (DevOps Engineer) is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining scalable, secure, and automated development-to-production workflows and cloud infrastructure. This role blends software engineering, systems administration, and platform automation to accelerate delivery, improve reliability, and enforce operational best practices across CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code (IaC), container orchestration (Kubernetes), cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP), configuration management, and observability.

Primary focus areas include continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), infrastructure automation (Terraform, CloudFormation), containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, Helm), monitoring and logging (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK), security and compliance (secrets management, policy as code), and incident response/runbook creation. The ideal candidate partners closely with development, QA, security, and product teams to deliver a fast, safe, and cost-effective software delivery lifecycle.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Software Engineer / Backend Engineer transitioning to platform and operations work
  • Systems Administrator or Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) looking to shift left to DevOps
  • Build & Release Engineer or Automation Engineer moving into cloud-native platform roles

Advancement To:

  • Senior DevOps / Senior Development Operations Engineer
  • Platform Engineer / Lead Platform Engineer
  • Cloud Architect or Principal Cloud Engineer
  • Head of DevOps, Engineering Manager for Platform, or SRE Manager

Lateral Moves:

  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
  • Release Manager or CI/CD Specialist
  • Security Engineer with focus on DevSecOps

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement, and maintain end-to-end CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or CircleCI to automate build, test, and deployment lifecycles for microservices and monolithic applications.
  • Author, maintain, and review Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, or similar frameworks to provision and manage reproducible cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, or GCP.
  • Build and operate containerization and orchestration solutions using Docker, Kubernetes, Helm charts, and operators, ensuring reliable deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, rolling updates).
  • Automate environment provisioning and configuration management with Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or SaltStack to ensure consistent development, staging, and production environments.
  • Implement and maintain cluster and node-level observability using Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, or similar monitoring tools to track health, latency, throughput, and error budgets.
  • Design and operate centralized logging and tracing platforms (ELK/EFK, Loki, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry) to enable rapid troubleshooting and root cause analysis.
  • Develop and enforce security best practices and compliance controls across the delivery pipeline, including secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), RBAC, network segmentation, and image scanning.
  • Create and manage reusable Terraform modules, Helm charts, and CI templates to accelerate platform consistency and reduce time-to-market for engineering teams.
  • Implement GitOps workflows using Flux, Argo CD, or similar tools to declaratively manage application and infrastructure changes in a controlled, auditable manner.
  • Troubleshoot production incidents, lead post-incident reviews, generate actionable runbooks, and implement long-term fixes to prevent recurrence and improve reliability.
  • Establish service level objectives (SLOs), service level indicators (SLIs), and service level agreements (SLAs); instrument services to measure against these reliability targets.
  • Optimize cloud compute, storage, and networking costs by identifying waste, rightsizing resources, implementing autoscaling, and leveraging reserved/spot instances where appropriate.
  • Manage artifact repositories, build artifacts, and release versions using Nexus, Artifactory, or cloud-native artifact stores, enforcing retention and promotion policies.
  • Integrate security testing and compliance checks (SAST, DAST, dependency scanning, container image scanning) into CI pipelines to shift security left and reduce vulnerabilities.
  • Automate backups, disaster recovery procedures, and database maintenance tasks to ensure data durability and fast recovery time objectives (RTO/RPO).
  • Collaborate closely with developers to instrument applications for telemetry, provide platform APIs, and advise on best practices for microservices, stateful services, and scaling patterns.
  • Design and document network architectures, ingress controllers, service mesh configurations (Istio, Linkerd), and API gateway integrations to support secure, observable service-to-service communication.
  • Implement secrets rotation, key management, and credential lifecycle policies in accordance with corporate security and regulatory requirements.
  • Drive release engineering best practices: branching strategies, code promotion, release windows, rollback procedures, and automated smoke testing to reduce deployment risk.
  • Mentor engineers on platform usage, CI/CD best practices, containerization, and cloud-native patterns; lead brown-bags and knowledge-transfer sessions to upskill teams.
  • Create and maintain comprehensive operational documentation, runbooks, run-charts, and onboarding guides to reduce context-switching and expedite incident response.
  • Perform capacity planning, performance testing, and tuning of infrastructure components (databases, caches, message brokers, web servers) to meet service demand and SLAs.
  • Evaluate, pilot, and onboard third-party tools and managed services that improve delivery velocity, security posture, or operational efficiency, including negotiating with vendors and aligning on SLAs.
  • Implement policy-as-code and guardrails (OPA, Gatekeeper) to enforce organizational standards across clusters and cloud accounts and prevent misconfiguration at scale.
  • Own build and release pipeline reliability, work to reduce build times, flakiness of tests, and overall developer feedback loop latency.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Provide on-call rotation coverage for production incidents and participate in continuous improvement of incident handling processes.
  • Coordinate cross-functional rollouts with QA, product, and security teams to ensure coordinated and safe launches.
  • Help define and measure KPIs for deployment frequency, mean time to recovery (MTTR), change failure rate, and lead time for changes.
  • Maintain CI/CD pipeline security and secrets hygiene, including scanning pipeline logs and artifact repositories for sensitive information.
  • Assist recruiting and interviewing for DevOps and platform-engineering hires; contribute to hiring criteria and team culture.
  • Support cost allocation tagging strategies and cloud billing reporting to align technical spend with business units.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Strong experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI.
  • Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Pulumi, or ARM templates.
  • Deep knowledge of containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, K8s operators, Helm charts.
  • Cloud platform expertise: AWS (EC2, EKS, RDS, S3, IAM), Azure (AKS, Azure AD), or Google Cloud Platform (GKE, Cloud Build).
  • Configuration management and automation: Ansible, Chef, Puppet, SaltStack.
  • Observability and monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK stack, OpenTelemetry.
  • Logging and distributed tracing: ELK/EFK, Loki, Jaeger, Zipkin.
  • Scripting and programming: Python, Go, Bash, or Ruby for automation and tooling.
  • Release and artifact management: Nexus, Artifactory, S3-backed artifact stores, and semantic versioning.
  • Security tooling and practices: Vault, AWS KMS/Secrets Manager, container image scanning (Clair, Trivy), SAST/DAST integration.
  • Networking and security fundamentals: load balancing, ingress controllers, VPN, VPC design, firewall rules, TLS, and network policy.
  • Policy-as-code and governance: Open Policy Agent (OPA), Gatekeeper, IAM policy management.
  • Experience with Git-based workflows and GitOps tools: Flux, Argo CD.
  • CI/CD testing and quality practices: automated unit/integration tests, canary analysis, feature flagging (LaunchDarkly, Flagr).
  • Database and stateful service operational experience: backups, replication, scaling, and failover strategies.
  • Familiarity with service meshes and API gateways: Istio, Linkerd, Kong, Ambassador.
  • Cost optimization and cloud billing tools: AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management, GCP Billing.
  • Container runtime security and hardening: CIS Benchmarks, runtime policy enforcement.
  • Experience creating and maintaining runbooks, postmortems, and operational playbooks.

Soft Skills

  • Strong collaboration and communication skills: able to translate technical constraints into business outcomes and work across engineering, product, and security teams.
  • Problem-solving and troubleshooting orientation with a bias for root-cause analysis and long-term fixes.
  • Ownership mindset: accountable for platform reliability, deployment safety, and continuous improvement.
  • Ability to work in agile, cross-functional teams and handle multiple priorities with pragmatic trade-offs.
  • Mentorship and teaching skills to coach engineers on DevOps best practices and platform usage.
  • Comfortable with ambiguity and building processes where none exist, while balancing speed and risk.
  • Customer-focused: experience supporting internal developer experience and reducing friction in the developer lifecycle.
  • Data-driven decision-making: use metrics and telemetry to prioritize work and measure impact.
  • Adaptability to fast-evolving toolchains and cloud-native architectures.
  • Empathy and constructive feedback skills to contribute positively to team culture.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Cloud Computing, or related fields; or industry certifications such as AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, Microsoft Azure DevOps Engineer, or Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Cloud Computing / Cloud Engineering
  • Cybersecurity / Information Security

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–7 years of hands-on experience in development operations, platform engineering, or systems engineering roles with demonstrable ownership of CI/CD pipelines and cloud infrastructure.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of experience operating production systems, with a proven track record of managing containerized workloads, automating infrastructure, and reducing deployment risk.
  • Demonstrated experience with multi-cloud or large-scale single-cloud environments and a history of delivering measurable improvements in deployment frequency, MTTR, and cost efficiency.
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