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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for DevOps Automation Engineer

💰 $ - $

DevOpsAutomationCloudSRECI/CD

🎯 Role Definition

The DevOps Automation Engineer is a hands-on automation and platform specialist responsible for designing, building, and maintaining scalable, secure, and highly-available infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines. This role combines software engineering, systems administration, and platform automation to accelerate developer delivery, ensure operational excellence, and enforce security and compliance across cloud-native environments. Core focus areas include Infrastructure as Code (IaC), container orchestration (Kubernetes), pipeline automation (Jenkins/GitLab/ArgoCD), observability (Prometheus/Grafana), and cloud cost/performance optimization.

Key search terms: DevOps, automation engineer, CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, Kubernetes, cloud-native, GitOps, observability, platform engineering, continuous delivery.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Systems Engineer / Platform Engineer
  • Software Engineer with DevOps focus
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) or Build & Release Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Senior DevOps / Platform Engineering Manager
  • Site Reliability Engineering Lead
  • Cloud Architect or Infrastructure Engineering Manager
  • Director of Platform Engineering / Head of DevOps

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Engineering Specialist (AWS/Azure/GCP)
  • Security Automation Engineer
  • Release Engineering Lead
  • Developer Experience (DevEx) Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Architect, build and operate end-to-end CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD or Tekton to automate build, test, security scanning, and release workflows for microservices and monoliths.
  • Design and implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi to provision and manage cloud infrastructure reliably and reproducibly across AWS, Azure, or GCP.
  • Build, maintain and scale Kubernetes clusters (EKS, AKS, GKE, or self-managed) including cluster lifecycle automation, node provisioning, autoscaling, upgrades and capacity planning to support production workloads.
  • Create and manage efficient container build pipelines and image registries (Dockerfile best practices, multi-stage builds, image scanning, registry lifecycle policies) and automate image promotion across environments.
  • Implement GitOps workflows (ArgoCD/Flux) and branching/merge strategies that ensure declarative, auditable, and reproducible deployments across staging and production environments.
  • Design and implement secrets management and credential rotation strategies using HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault or similar to ensure secure handling of secrets, keys and tokens.
  • Automate application and infrastructure configuration management using Ansible, Chef, Puppet or SaltStack to enforce consistency across environments and reduce configuration drift.
  • Integrate security and compliance checks into pipelines (SAST/DAST, container scanning, IaC scanning such as tfsec/checkov, dependency scanning, license checks) and automate remediation workflows with security teams.
  • Build and maintain robust observability (metrics, logs, traces) using Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Loki, Jaeger or OpenTelemetry to provide actionable insights, SLOs/SLIs, and automated alerting.
  • Design and test disaster recovery, backup, and business continuity automation for critical systems, including automated failover, backup verification and runbooks for incident response.
  • Create reusable automation libraries, Terraform modules and Helm charts to standardize deployments and accelerate developer onboarding while maintaining security and compliance guardrails.
  • Drive cost optimization automation on cloud platforms including rightsizing, reserved/spot instances automation, and tagging/policy enforcement to minimize cloud spend.
  • Collaborate with development teams to onboard applications to the platform, provide build/release support, and develop developer tooling and self-service platforms for improved developer experience.
  • Implement and maintain service mesh, ingress, and API gateway automation (Istio/Linkerd/NGINX/Traefik) for secure, observable and resilient service-to-service communication.
  • Lead blue/green, canary, and progressive delivery strategies through automation and orchestrate rollback and remediation steps as part of release pipelines to minimize customer impact.
  • Automate database schema migrations, versioning and promotion across environments while ensuring data integrity and rollback strategies are in place.
  • Build automated monitoring and incident response playbooks (runbooks) and integrate with incident management systems (PagerDuty, Opsgenie) to reduce mean time to detection and recovery (MTTD/MTTR).
  • Continuously evaluate, select, and integrate automation tools and frameworks; pilot and productionize new platform features, ensuring minimal disruption and clear operational ownership.
  • Maintain strong version control and CI/CD hygiene practices (branching strategies, code reviews, pipeline-as-code) to ensure traceability and reproducibility across all automation artifacts.
  • Implement telemetry-based auto-scaling and resource orchestration, using metrics and predictive automation to ensure resilient performance at scale.
  • Provide on-call support and lead post-incident reviews, translating operational learnings into automated preventative measures and platform improvements.
  • Drive documentation and training initiatives for platform usage, automation patterns, and operational procedures to improve cross-team adoption and reduce support load.
  • Mentor junior engineers on automation best practices, IaC patterns, and cloud-native operations, fostering a culture of automation-first thinking.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc infrastructure requests, environment provisioning and exploratory automation demos for product and platform teams.
  • Contribute to organization-wide platform strategy, SRE playbooks, and roadmap items that formalize automation, reliability, and security practices.
  • Collaborate with product owners and business stakeholders to translate feature requirements into infrastructure and pipeline engineering tasks.
  • Participate actively in sprint planning, agile ceremonies and cross-functional architecture reviews to ensure engineering priorities align with platform capabilities.
  • Assist in procurement and vendor evaluation for CI/CD, observability, and cloud management solutions, including cost-benefit analysis and POC coordination.
  • Help maintain compliance evidence and audit trails for internal and external audits (SOC2, ISO, GDPR) by automating logging, access controls, and reporting.
  • Provide periodic platform health reporting and automation ROI metrics to engineering leadership to justify investments and improvements.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Expertise with CI/CD platforms and pipeline-as-code: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Tekton — designing scalable, secure pipelines for multi-environment deployments.
  • Strong Infrastructure as Code (IaC) skills using Terraform, CloudFormation or Pulumi, including writing reusable modules and managing state in teams.
  • Advanced Kubernetes administration and automation experience (EKS/AKS/GKE or upstream), including Helm charts, operators, cluster autoscaling and upgrade automation.
  • Proficient in containerization technologies and image pipeline automation: Docker, container registries, image scanning tools and best practices for secure images.
  • Cloud platform proficiency: AWS, Azure, and/or Google Cloud Platform — provisioning compute, networking, IAM, storage, and managed platform services.
  • Configuration management and automation tooling: Ansible, Chef, Puppet, SaltStack — to enforce consistent systems configuration and automated remediation.
  • Observability and monitoring tools: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Loki, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry — instrumenting services and building dashboards/alerts and SLOs.
  • Security automation and policy as code: experience with SAST/DAST tools, container/IaC scanning (Snyk, Trivy, tfsec, checkov), and integrating findings into pipelines.
  • Scripting and programming: strong scripting (Bash, PowerShell) and higher-level languages (Python, Go, Ruby) for automation, tooling, and operator development.
  • Secrets and access management: HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault — automated rotation, RBAC and integration with CI/CD.
  • Service mesh and networking automation: Istio, Linkerd, Envoy or other ingress/controllers — implementing secure, observable service communication.
  • Database deployment and migration automation: Flyway, Liquibase, schema migration automation and rollback strategies integrated into pipelines.
  • Familiarity with GitOps principles, IaC testing frameworks, unit/integration testing for infrastructure and pipeline testing frameworks.
  • Knowledge of container security, network policies, pod security standards, and hardening Kubernetes clusters for production workloads.
  • Experience with cost management tooling and automation for cloud cost optimization and tagging enforcement.
  • Familiarity with observability-driven autoscaling, chaos engineering basics, and performance testing automation.

Soft Skills

  • Strong collaboration and communicator — able to partner across engineering, security, product, and operations teams.
  • Problem-solving mindset with systems-thinking and the ability to break complex operational problems into automated solutions.
  • Ownership mentality — accountable for operational readiness, reliability, and continuous improvement of platform services.
  • Prioritization and time management skills in fast-paced environments; balancing technical debt and delivery commitments.
  • Mentorship and knowledge-sharing — able to document, teach, and onboard teams onto automation patterns and platform capabilities.
  • Customer-first orientation — understanding developer experience and delivering self-service tooling that reduces friction.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning — comfortable evaluating new tools, cloud features, and automation practices and driving adoption.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, or equivalent technical field OR equivalent professional experience (e.g., proven DevOps/platform engineering experience).

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field.
  • Certifications (optional but advantageous): AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Google Professional DevOps Engineer, Azure DevOps Engineer Expert, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science / Software Engineering
  • Information Technology / Systems Engineering
  • Cloud Computing / Distributed Systems

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–7+ years in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, platform engineering, or cloud operations roles.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years building production automation and platform tooling with demonstrable CI/CD, IaC, and Kubernetes experience.
  • Proven track record of shipping and operating large-scale cloud-native systems, reducing lead time for changes and improving system reliability via automation.
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