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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for DevOps Specialist

💰 $ - $

EngineeringDevOpsSite Reliability

🎯 Role Definition

The DevOps Specialist is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining scalable, secure, and automated infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines. This role partners with development, QA, security, and product teams to shorten delivery cycles, increase deployment frequency, and improve system reliability through automation, infrastructure as code (IaC), monitoring, and operational best practices. The ideal candidate combines strong cloud and containerization expertise with scripting, observability, and a collaborative approach to solve complex production challenges.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior DevOps Engineer or Cloud Operations Engineer (1–3 years experience)
  • System Administrator / Linux Engineer with automation experience
  • Build/Release Engineer or Automation Engineer

Advancement To:

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

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Engineer (AWS / Azure / GCP specialist)
  • Release Manager / CI/CD Architect
  • Security Engineer (DevSecOps focus)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement, and maintain scalable CI/CD pipelines using modern tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, or Tekton) to automate build, test, and deployment workflows across multiple environments.
  • Build and operate cloud-native infrastructure on AWS, Azure, and/or GCP using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi, ensuring repeatable, auditable infrastructure provisioning.
  • Containerize applications and maintain Kubernetes clusters (EKS, AKS, GKE, or self-managed K8s), including helm chart development, RBAC configuration, and cluster lifecycle management.
  • Develop and maintain automation scripts and tooling in Python, Go, Bash, or PowerShell to reduce manual toil, accelerate delivery, and enforce configuration standards.
  • Implement and manage configuration management systems (Ansible, Chef, Puppet) to ensure consistent and secure system configurations across environments.
  • Design and maintain robust monitoring, logging, and observability stacks using Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK (Elasticsearch, Fluentd/Logstash, Kibana), Datadog, New Relic, or Splunk to provide end-to-end visibility into application and infrastructure health.
  • Define and enforce operational runbooks, incident response playbooks, and SLO/SLI-based reliability targets; lead post-incident reviews and remediation to drive continuous improvement.
  • Harden infrastructure and pipelines with security best practices: integrate IaC scanning, secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault), container image scanning, and runtime security controls.
  • Optimize cloud resource utilization and cost by implementing autoscaling policies, rightsizing, reserved instances/savings plans, and cost-monitoring tooling.
  • Manage build artifacts and binary repositories (Artifactory, Nexus, or cloud-native artifact services) and enforce artifact lifecycle policies to support reproducible deployments.
  • Implement blue/green, canary, and rolling deployment strategies to minimize risk during releases and drive faster, safer rollouts.
  • Collaborate with development teams to instrument applications for observability, tracing (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger), and actionable metrics that inform reliability and performance improvements.
  • Maintain and extend platform services (service mesh such as Istio/Linkerd, ingress controllers, API gateways) to provide secure and reliable service-to-service communication and traffic management.
  • Perform capacity planning and scaling strategies for compute, storage, and network resources, ensuring predictable performance under variable workloads.
  • Establish and enforce CI/CD pipeline quality gates, automated testing stages (unit, integration, performance), and release approvals to ensure production readiness.
  • Operate and maintain VPNs, load balancers, network security groups, firewall rules, and routing in cloud and hybrid environments to ensure secure, compliant connectivity.
  • Manage backup, restore, and disaster recovery processes for critical infrastructure components and data stores, and regularly validate recovery procedures.
  • Integrate security scanning and compliance checks directly into CI/CD pipelines (SAST, DAST, IaC scanning) and work with security teams to remediate vulnerabilities.
  • Lead migration projects for legacy systems to cloud-native architectures, providing technical leadership on replatforming, modernization, and automation strategies.
  • Implement GitOps patterns and workflows (Argo CD, Flux) to drive declarative, version-controlled infrastructure and application deployments.
  • Mentor junior engineers, run workshops on DevOps best practices, and drive knowledge sharing across engineering teams to elevate platform adoption and operational maturity.
  • Maintain detailed documentation of architecture, runbooks, and standard operating procedures to ensure reproducible operations and onboarding of new engineers.
  • Evaluate and pilot new DevOps and cloud-native tools and frameworks, producing recommendations, proofs-of-concept, and cost/benefit analyses to evolve the platform.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc operational investigations and request-driven analysis to unblock development and QA teams during releases.
  • Contribute to the organization’s cloud governance and infrastructure roadmap, helping prioritize initiatives for reliability, cost optimization, and security.
  • Collaborate with product and business stakeholders to translate feature and compliance requirements into operationally-sound infrastructure solutions.
  • Participate in sprint planning, agile ceremonies, and cross-functional architecture reviews to align DevOps deliverables with product timelines.
  • Assist in onboarding new services to the platform by providing templates, CI/CD examples, and hands-on support to development teams.
  • Help define and track key performance indicators (KPIs) for platform health, deployment frequency, lead time for changes, and mean time to recovery (MTTR).
  • Provide occasional out-of-hours on-call support and incident leadership, and help refine the on-call rotation processes to reduce alert fatigue.
  • Support compliance audits by producing evidence of controls, pipeline policies, and operational procedures required by SOC2, ISO, PCI, or HIPAA frameworks.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud Platforms: Deep hands-on experience with AWS, Azure, and/or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — provisioning, networking, IAM, and managed service integrations.
  • Containerization & Orchestration: Strong expertise with Docker and Kubernetes (cluster provisioning, upgrades, networking, storage, and Helm charts).
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Proficiency with Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi for repeatable, version-controlled infrastructure.
  • CI/CD Tooling: Experience designing and operating pipelines with Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, or Tekton; implementing automated testing and deployment strategies.
  • Configuration Management: Practical experience with Ansible, Chef, or Puppet to automate system configuration and application delivery.
  • Scripting & Programming: Proficient in at least one scripting or programming language used for automation (Python, Go, Bash, or PowerShell).
  • Observability & Monitoring: Implement and maintain monitoring, logging, and tracing using Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Datadog, or Splunk.
  • Security & Compliance: Knowledge of secrets management (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), container image scanning, IaC security scanning, and cloud security best practices.
  • Networking & Load Balancing: Strong understanding of VPCs, subnets, routing, VPNs, firewalls, and cloud load balancer configuration.
  • Release Strategies & Deployment Patterns: Experience implementing blue/green, canary, rolling updates, and GitOps workflows (Argo CD, Flux).
  • Artifact & Dependency Management: Familiarity with artifact repositories and dependency management (JFrog Artifactory, Nexus).
  • Database & Storage Operations: Practical experience operating managed databases, backups, and storage lifecycle management.
  • Observability Engineering: Skills in creating dashboards, alerts, and SLO/SLI-based monitoring frameworks.
  • Cost Optimization: Practical skills in cloud cost monitoring, rightsizing, and cost governance tools.
  • Automation Frameworks: Experience building platform tooling, CLI tooling, or developer self-service portals.

Soft Skills

  • Strong collaboration and communication skills to work effectively across engineering, product, and security teams.
  • Problem-solving mindset with the ability to troubleshoot complex, distributed system issues under pressure.
  • Prioritization and time management: balance delivery speed with reliability and security.
  • Mentoring and knowledge sharing: coach junior engineers and promote best practices.
  • Continuous learning and curiosity about cloud-native technologies and operational excellence.
  • Customer-oriented: understand developer needs and build empathetic platform solutions.
  • Documentation discipline and a focus on reproducible, auditable processes.
  • Adaptability: comfortable with fast-paced environments and changing priorities.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in a related field or relevant cloud / DevOps certifications (AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), HashiCorp Terraform Associate).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Technology
  • Systems Engineering
  • Cloud Computing / DevOps Certifications

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3–7 years of hands-on experience in DevOps, platform engineering, cloud operations, or site reliability engineering roles.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of progressively responsible experience with cloud-native architectures, CI/CD, and production operations in SaaS or large-scale distributed systems. Experience with compliance frameworks (SOC2, ISO, PCI, HIPAA) and demonstrated ownership of platform reliability and automation initiatives.
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