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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for DevOps Administrator

💰 $85,000 - $140,000

ITDevOpsCloudInfrastructure

🎯 Role Definition

The DevOps Administrator is responsible for designing, implementing, and operating scalable, secure, and automated infrastructure and deployment pipelines that enable rapid, reliable delivery of applications and services. This role combines systems administration, cloud engineering, automation, and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices to support development and production environments, reduce manual toil, and improve reliability and observability across the stack.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Systems Administrator / Linux Administrator
  • Build & Release Engineer
  • Junior Cloud Operations Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Senior DevOps Engineer
  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead
  • Cloud Infrastructure Architect
  • Platform Engineering Manager

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Engineer
  • Release Manager
  • Automation Engineer
  • Security Operations Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, build, and maintain robust CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or Azure DevOps to automate builds, tests, and deployments across development, staging, and production environments.
  • Implement and manage Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, or similar frameworks to provision and version cloud infrastructure consistently and repeatably.
  • Deploy, configure, and operate container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, OpenShift, EKS/GKE/AKS) including cluster provisioning, networking, storage, and upgrade processes to ensure high availability and scalability.
  • Build and maintain containerization workflows using Docker, creating optimized Dockerfiles, images, and registries to support microservices and CI/CD deployment patterns.
  • Administer and secure cloud environments on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, including IAM configuration, VPC/subnet design, cost optimization, and cloud-native service integrations.
  • Automate routine operations, configuration management, and system provisioning using tools like Ansible, Chef, or Puppet to enforce consistency and reduce manual configuration drift.
  • Monitor system and application health using observability stacks (Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, New Relic) and implement alerting, dashboards, and incident playbooks to reduce MTTR.
  • Implement logging and centralized log aggregation, retention policies, and search capabilities to support troubleshooting, compliance, and forensic analysis.
  • Harden production infrastructure by applying security best practices, vulnerability management, patching strategies, secret management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), and compliance automation.
  • Manage backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity plans, including automated snapshots, replication, and documented recovery procedures for critical services and data.
  • Collaborate with developers and QA to design deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, rolling upgrades) and maintain deployment orchestration to minimize downtime and risk.
  • Maintain and administer version control and branching strategies in Git repositories, enforce code review workflows, and integrate security and quality gates into pipelines.
  • Troubleshoot and resolve infrastructure, networking, and performance issues across the stack, performing root cause analysis and implementing preventive improvements.
  • Implement service mesh, API gateway, ingress controllers, and load balancing to enable secure and observable inter-service communication for microservices architectures.
  • Enforce cost-control and governance policies for cloud usage, provide regular reporting on resource utilization, and implement autoscaling and rightsizing initiatives.
  • Build automation for environment lifecycle management (provisioning, tear-down) for ephemeral dev/test environments to accelerate engineering velocity.
  • Define and document operational runbooks, deployment guides, and architecture diagrams; maintain runbook-driven incident response procedures and postmortem practices.
  • Integrate security scanning, SCA/DAST/SAST, and compliance checks into the build pipeline to catch issues early and enforce policy-as-code.
  • Provide on-call support and participate in incident response rotations, coordinating mitigation, communication, and post-incident remediation with cross-functional teams.
  • Lead platform improvements and platform-as-a-product initiatives that standardize developer experience, self-service tooling, and best-practice templates for applications.
  • Mentor and coach developers and junior operations staff on containerization, IaC, CI/CD, and cloud-native operational patterns to raise team capability and adoption.
  • Evaluate and recommend new tools, managed services, and processes to improve automation, reliability, security, or cost-efficiency, running POCs and vendor comparisons as needed.

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.
  • Assist in preparing capacity planning reports and recommend scaling strategies for upcoming releases.
  • Coordinate with security and compliance teams to support audits, evidence collection, and remediation tracking.
  • Provide training sessions, internal documentation, and knowledge transfer to cross-functional teams to ensure platform adoption and best practices.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep experience with Linux system administration (Ubuntu/CentOS/RHEL) and shell scripting (bash, zsh).
  • Proficiency with public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) including core services (EC2, S3, IAM, VPC, RDS, CloudWatch/Azure Monitor).
  • Expertise in containerization and orchestration: Docker and Kubernetes (helm charts, operators, ingress, RBAC).
  • Strong IaC skills: Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or similar tools for reproducible infrastructure provisioning.
  • CI/CD tooling and pipeline authoring: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, or Azure DevOps.
  • Configuration management and automation: Ansible, Puppet, or Chef for system configuration and automated deployments.
  • Monitoring and observability: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK stack, Datadog, New Relic, and experience building dashboards and alerts.
  • Networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, DNS, load balancers, VPNs, routing, and firewall/security group configuration.
  • Security tooling and practices: secret management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), vulnerability scanning, and infrastructure hardening.
  • Scripting and programming: Python, Go, or Ruby for automation, tool integration, and custom tooling.
  • Logging, tracing, and APM integration for distributed systems (Jaeger, Zipkin, OpenTelemetry).
  • Database operations understanding (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis) including backup, replication, and connection pooling.
  • Experience with service meshes and API gateways (Istio, Linkerd, Kong, Ambassador) is a plus.
  • Familiarity with Git workflows, branching strategies, and code review processes.
  • Knowledge of cost management tools and cloud governance best practices.

Soft Skills

  • Strong problem-solving and analytical thinking with a bias for root cause analysis and long-term remediation.
  • Clear written and verbal communication skills for documenting runbooks and coordinating incident response.
  • Collaborative mindset: works closely with developers, QA, security, and product teams to deliver results.
  • Time management and prioritization skills to balance on-call duties, projects, and maintenance windows.
  • Adaptability to rapidly changing technologies and evolving organizational needs.
  • Attention to detail and a focus on operational excellence and reliability.
  • Mentorship and knowledge-sharing orientation to grow team capability.
  • Customer-service orientation: treats internal engineering teams as customers and seeks to improve their developer experience.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in a relevant field or professional certifications (AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, Certified Kubernetes Administrator, HashiCorp Terraform Associate).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Systems
  • Software Engineering
  • Network Engineering
  • Cloud Computing / DevOps-related certifications

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3–7 years of professional experience in systems administration, cloud operations, or DevOps-focused roles.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of progressive experience managing cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and containerized production environments with demonstrated ownership of deployment, monitoring, and incident response activities.
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