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devops engineer

title: Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for DevOps Engineer
salary: $90,000 - $170,000
categories: ["Engineering", "DevOps", "Cloud", "SRE"]
description: A comprehensive overview of the key responsibilities, required technical skills and professional background for the role of a DevOps Engineer.
Comprehensive, recruiter-style summary of the DevOps Engineer role: responsibilities, technical and soft skills, career progression, education and experience expectations. Includes actionable, SEO-optimized keywords (DevOps, CI/CD, Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, automation, observability, SRE) to align with candidate searches and ATS/LLM parsing.

🎯 Role Definition

The DevOps Engineer is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining scalable, secure, and highly available infrastructure and delivery pipelines that enable rapid, reliable software delivery. The role blends software engineering, systems administration, and cloud architecture to automate operations, improve reliability, and accelerate product development. Ideal candidates have hands-on experience with CI/CD automation, cloud platforms (AWS, Azure or GCP), container orchestration (Kubernetes), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CloudFormation), monitoring and observability, and a strong sense of security and cost optimization.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Systems Administrator / Linux Administrator with scripting experience
  • Software Engineer with interest in infrastructure and automation
  • Cloud Engineer or Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) transitioning to platform-focused work

Advancement To:

  • Senior DevOps Engineer / Principal DevOps Engineer
  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead or Manager
  • Platform Engineering Manager or Cloud Architect
  • Director of Infrastructure, Head of Platform, or VP of Engineering (platform focus)

Lateral Moves:

  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Platform Engineer
  • Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
  • Security Engineer (Cloud/DevSecOps)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement, and maintain automated CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or CircleCI to accelerate safe and repeatable software delivery across multiple environments.
  • Build and operate cloud-native infrastructure on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or Pulumi, ensuring reproducible, version-controlled environments.
  • Architect, deploy, and manage containerized applications using Docker and Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS), including workload scheduling, autoscaling, service discovery, and cluster health management.
  • Create and maintain configuration management and orchestration using Ansible, Chef, or Puppet to ensure consistency, compliance, and rapid provisioning of servers and services.
  • Implement observability solutions including centralized logging (ELK, Fluentd, Loki), metrics collection (Prometheus, CloudWatch, Datadog), and visualization (Grafana) to provide actionable insights and reduce mean time to detect (MTTD).
  • Define and enforce security best practices across the deployment pipeline: secrets management (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), vulnerability scanning, image hardening, RBAC, and compliance automation.
  • Automate routine operational tasks and day-to-day maintenance via scripting (Python, Go, Bash) and workflow orchestration to reduce manual toil and support 24/7 operations.
  • Design and execute disaster recovery and business continuity plans including backups, multi-region/availability zone strategies, and failover testing to ensure high availability and data integrity.
  • Lead incident response and postmortem processes: triage outages, perform root cause analysis (RCA), implement corrective actions, and share learnings company-wide to improve system reliability.
  • Implement and manage service mesh and networking configurations (Istio/Linkerd, Envoy) for secure, observable east-west traffic, resilience, and fine-grained control of microservices communication.
  • Optimize cloud costs through rightsizing, reserved instances/savings plans, efficient storage policies, and automated cleanup of unused resources while balancing performance and availability.
  • Maintain and evolve developer-facing platform services (internal CI runners, artifact registries, container registries) to improve developer productivity and reduce onboarding friction.
  • Collaborate with engineering teams to define SLO/SLI and SLA targets, monitor compliance, and implement automation to meet reliability objectives and business requirements.
  • Integrate and maintain code repositories and branching strategies (Git workflows, monorepo/multi-repo patterns) and enforce CI checks, code scanning, and quality gates to prevent regressions.
  • Create and maintain clear, versioned runbooks, on-call playbooks, and operational runbooks for production support and knowledge sharing across teams.
  • Drive adoption of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) testing, policy as code (OPA, Sentinel), and CI-based validation of infrastructure changes to reduce risk during deployments.
  • Build and maintain telemetry pipelines to support advanced debugging, distributed tracing (Jaeger, Zipkin), and performance analysis across distributed systems.
  • Participate actively in sprint planning, architecture reviews, and cross-functional design sessions to align infrastructure evolution with product goals and security/compliance needs.
  • Mentor junior engineers and contribute to hiring, onboarding, and continuous learning programs to raise platform expertise across the organization.
  • Manage secrets, certificates, and keys lifecycle including automation for rotation, revocation, and secure distribution to minimize exposure and comply with security controls.
  • Evaluate, prototype, and onboard new tools and managed services (Database as a Service, managed Kubernetes, serverless functions) to accelerate roadmap delivery while controlling operational overhead.
  • Drive standardization of deployment patterns, IaC modules, and shared libraries to improve maintainability, reusability, and developer experience across teams.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc operational requests, investigative troubleshooting, and ad-hoc performance tuning to unblock engineering teams quickly.
  • Contribute to platform and cloud cost reports, capacity planning, and forecasting to help stakeholders make data-driven infrastructure decisions.
  • Collaborate with security, compliance, and audit teams to prepare for assessments and to implement controls that meet regulatory requirements (PCI, SOC2, GDPR).
  • Produce and maintain documentation, runbooks, and onboarding guides to facilitate cross-team knowledge transfer and self-service.
  • Participate in on-call rotations, escalations, and post-incident reviews to drive continuous improvement of the production environment.
  • Assist in creating test environments, blue/green or canary deployments for new features, and enable safe rollout strategies with rollback automation.
  • Help product teams translate requirements into scalable deployment architectures and offer guidance on cost, security, and performance trade-offs.
  • Collect and analyze operational metrics and user feedback to propose improvements in deployment velocity, system stability, and developer experience.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud Platforms: Deep experience with AWS (EC2, ECS, EKS, RDS, S3, IAM), Azure, or GCP; ability to design multi-account/tenant architectures and networking (VPC, Subnets, Transit Gateway).
  • Containerization & Orchestration: Hands-on with Docker, Kubernetes, Helm charts, operators, and cluster lifecycle management (EKS/GKE/AKS).
  • CI/CD Tooling: Expertise in Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Spinnaker or CircleCI for pipeline design, secret injection, and deployment strategies.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Proficient with Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi for modular, testable, and versioned infrastructure provisioning.
  • Configuration Management: Experience with Ansible, Chef, or Puppet for system configuration, patching, and immutable infrastructure patterns.
  • Scripting & Programming: Strong scripting in Python, Bash; familiarity with Go, Ruby, or other languages for automation and tool development.
  • Observability & Monitoring: Implementing Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK stack, Loki, and distributed tracing tools (Jaeger, Zipkin).
  • Networking & Security: Knowledge of load balancing, DNS, TLS, firewall rules, VPNs, network segmentation, and cloud security best practices (IAM policies, least privilege).
  • DevSecOps: Integrating security scanning into pipelines—SCA/ SAST/ DAST, container image scanning (Clair, Trivy), and implementing secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager).
  • CI/CD Testing & Validation: Experience with automated testing in pipelines (unit/integration/e2e), blue/green, canary releases, and feature flags.
  • Database & Storage Operations: Familiarity with managed databases, backups, replication, and storage performance tuning across cloud providers.
  • Cost Optimization & Governance: Skills in cost analysis, tagging strategies, and automation to control cloud spend.
  • Service Mesh & API Gateway: Practical experience with Istio/Linkerd, Envoy, Kong, or AWS API Gateway for traffic management and security.
  • Authentication & Identity: Implementing SSO/SSO integrations, OAuth2, OIDC, and centralized identity governance across services.
  • CI/CD Security & Compliance: Implementing audit trails, pipeline RBAC, and compliance reporting to meet regulatory requirements.

Soft Skills

  • Strong communicative skills: Able to explain complex technical solutions to engineers and stakeholders clearly and persuasively.
  • Collaboration: Works cross-functionally with Dev, QA, Product, and Security teams to deliver integrated solutions and prioritize platform work.
  • Problem-solving & Root Cause Analysis: Methodical approach to troubleshooting complex distributed systems with a bias for durable fixes.
  • Ownership & Accountability: Drives end-to-end ownership of services, from design through production support and iterative improvement.
  • Adaptability & Learning: Quickly learns new cloud services and tools and drives adoption where they bring value.
  • Mentorship: Coaches junior engineers, leads technical interviews, and contributes to building a high-performing team culture.
  • Time Management & Prioritization: Balances urgent incidents, long-term platform initiatives, and developer enablement with limited resources.
  • Customer-focused mindset: Aligns infrastructure improvements to developer and business needs to increase throughput and reduce friction.
  • Documentation & Knowledge Sharing: Writes clear runbooks, guides, and postmortems to reduce knowledge silos and improve team autonomy.
  • Decision-making under pressure: Maintains calm and makes pragmatic trade-offs during incidents and high-visibility outages.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s in Computer Science or Engineering, or advanced certificates in Cloud/DevOps disciplines.
  • Professional certifications (preferred but not required): AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, AWS Solutions Architect, Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Cloud Computing / Distributed Systems
  • DevOps / Site Reliability Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8 years of practical experience in systems engineering, cloud operations, or platform engineering with demonstrated ownership of production services.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years working with cloud infrastructure and production deployment pipelines.
  • Proven track record of building and operating Kubernetes clusters, IaC at scale (Terraform/CloudFormation), and end-to-end CI/CD automation.
  • Experience participating in an on-call rotation, incident management, and production troubleshooting for highly available distributed systems.
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