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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for DevSecOps Engineer

💰 $95,000 - $170,000

SecurityDevOpsCloudEngineeringPlatform

🎯 Role Definition

The DevSecOps Engineer is a hands-on security and automation practitioner who embeds security into software development and operational processes. This role designs and implements secure CI/CD pipelines, automates vulnerability detection and remediation, enforces policy-as-code, and partners with engineering teams to reduce risk across cloud-native applications and infrastructure. The ideal candidate brings deep knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), container orchestration (Kubernetes), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation), and application security tools (SAST/DAST, SCA), combined with a strong security mindset and excellent collaboration skills to influence secure-by-design practices across the organization.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior DevOps Engineer with security responsibilities
  • Application Security Engineer or Security Automation Engineer
  • Cloud Engineer / Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Advancement To:

  • Senior DevSecOps Engineer / Lead DevSecOps
  • Security Architect (Cloud & DevSecOps)
  • Head of Platform Security / Director of Engineering, Security
  • Principal Engineer (Security-focused platform role)

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Security Engineer
  • Application Security (AppSec) Engineer
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with security specialization
  • Compliance & Risk Engineering roles

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, build, and operate secure CI/CD pipelines that integrate static analysis (SAST), dynamic testing (DAST), software composition analysis (SCA), and secret scanning to catch vulnerabilities early in the software development lifecycle.
  • Implement and maintain infrastructure-as-code (IaC) solutions (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) with policy-as-code controls and automated IaC scanning (Checkov, tfsec) to enforce secure configuration baselines across cloud environments.
  • Develop and maintain automated security gating and remediation workflows within CI pipelines, ensuring failed security checks provide actionable remediation guidance to developers and are integrated into ticketing systems.
  • Architect and operate container security and runtime defenses for Kubernetes and container platforms, including image scanning, admission controllers, Pod security policies, and runtime threat detection using tools such as Kubernetes Network Policies and Falco.
  • Build, maintain, and optimize cloud-native identity and access management (IAM) controls, least-privilege role definitions, and automated provisioning to reduce risk from misconfigured permissions and credentials.
  • Lead vulnerability management and remediation processes by integrating vulnerability scanners, prioritizing findings based on risk and business impact, and driving cross-team remediation SLAs.
  • Automate secrets management and rotation using tools like HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or Azure Key Vault, and integrate secret-scanning into development workflows to prevent credential leakage.
  • Integrate security telemetry into centralized observability and SIEM platforms (Splunk, ELK, Datadog, Sumo Logic) to enable monitoring, alerting, and forensics for security incidents and anomalous behavior.
  • Implement and enforce GitOps and secure branching/merge policies, code signing, and artifact trust (e.g., Notary, Sigstore) to ensure integrity across build and deployment artifacts.
  • Develop and maintain security-as-code policies and automated compliance checks for standards such as SOC 2, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001, and internal security baselines; provide evidence and automation for audits.
  • Perform threat modeling and risk assessments for new features and platform changes; collaborate with product and engineering teams to translate threats into prioritized mitigations.
  • Create and maintain reusable security libraries, templates, and modules (Terraform modules, Helm charts) that incorporate best-practice security defaults to speed secure application delivery.
  • Design automated blue/green and canary deployment strategies with security controls to reduce risk during rollouts and enable quick rollback with minimal exposure.
  • Lead security incident response for platform and CI/CD-related incidents, including triage, containment, root cause analysis, remediation, and post-incident process improvements.
  • Partner with application teams to integrate SAST/DAST pipelines and secure coding practices, run security training, and organize security-focused developer enablement sessions and playbooks.
  • Build and scale automated approval and exception workflows for secure deployments, ensuring business velocity while maintaining traceable security guardrails.
  • Evaluate, select, and operationalize security tooling (SCA, SAST, DAST, container security, runtime protection) and continuously measure tool efficacy and coverage across the software estate.
  • Maintain and harden container images and base OS images, automate image build pipelines, and enforce vulnerability patching cadences with minimal disruption to delivery.
  • Drive cost-effective and secure cloud-native architecture patterns (network segmentation, VPC design, private endpoints) that align with the organization’s threat model and compliance needs.
  • Collaborate with Platform, Networking, and Infrastructure teams to design secure networking, encryption, and key management solutions across cloud and on-prem components.
  • Implement automated governance and remediation at scale using policy engines such as Open Policy Agent (OPA)/Gatekeeper, Conftest, or Cloud provider policy services.
  • Monitor and report on security metrics — time-to-remediate vulnerabilities, mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to respond (MTTR), compliance posture — and provide recommendations for continuous improvement.

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.
  • Produce clear runbooks, operational runbooks, and onboarding documentation for secure platform usage and incident playbooks for developers and on-call engineers.
  • Mentor junior engineers and conduct regular security reviews and brown-bag sessions to raise security awareness and skills across teams.
  • Participate in procurement and evaluation cycles for new security tools and vendors, including proofs-of-concept and integration planning.
  • Maintain an asset inventory and software bill-of-materials (SBOM) generation process to speed vulnerability discovery and patching.
  • Collaborate with compliance and legal teams to interpret regulatory requirements and design automated controls that provide demonstrable compliance evidence.
  • Engage with external security researchers and manage coordinated vulnerability disclosure processes for platform components.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud Security (AWS / Azure / GCP): design and operate secure cloud services, IAM hardening, network segmentation, private connectivity, and cloud-native logging and monitoring.
  • Container & Kubernetes Security: image scanning, admission controllers, PodSecurity, network policies, RBAC, runtime detection (Falco, Aqua, Prisma Cloud).
  • CI/CD & Pipeline Automation: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, CircleCI or similar, integrating security tooling and automated gates.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi — authoring secure modules, testing, and automated scanning (Checkov, tfsec).
  • Security Tooling: SAST (e.g., SonarQube, Checkmarx), DAST (e.g., OWASP ZAP, Burp), SCA (e.g., Snyk, Dependabot), secret scanners.
  • Policy-as-Code & Governance: Open Policy Agent (OPA), Gatekeeper, Conftest, AWS Config, Azure Policy; enforce guardrails programmatically.
  • Secrets Management & Key Management: HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, KMS, PKI best practices, TLS and certificate automation.
  • Vulnerability Management & Remediation: CVE triage, prioritization, automated patching and remediation workflows integrated with ticketing systems.
  • Observability & SIEM Integration: ELK, Splunk, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana for security telemetry and incident detection.
  • Scripting & Automation: Python, Go, Bash, or similar for automation, tool integrations, and custom tooling development.
  • GitOps & Artifact Security: ArgoCD/Flux, artifact registries, container image signing (Notary, Sigstore), SBOM generation.
  • Networking & Transport Security: TCP/IP, TLS, mTLS, network policy design, and VPN/PrivateLink architectures.
  • Secure Software Development Lifecycle (SSDLC): threat modeling, security requirements, secure code reviews, and developer enablement.
  • Compliance & Risk Frameworks: SOC 2, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, NIST, ISO — translating requirements into automated controls and evidence.
  • Runtime Protection & EDR Integration: implementation of runtime defenses, host and container EDR, and incident response playbooks.
  • Identity & Access Management Automation: automation of role provisioning, ephemeral credentials, and least-privilege enforcement.
  • Continuous Monitoring & Alerting: design of meaningful security alerts, escalation flows, and health checks for security pipelines and tooling.

Soft Skills

  • Strong collaboration and stakeholder management — able to partner with engineering, product, and security leadership to balance security and velocity.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication — translating technical security findings into clear, actionable guidance for developers and executives.
  • Problem-solving and analytical mindset — systematically triage root causes and design repeatable automation to eliminate manual toil.
  • Coaching and mentorship — develop developer security capabilities and lead cross-functional security initiatives.
  • Prioritization and pragmatic decision-making — balance risk, cost, and delivery timelines when recommending mitigations.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning — keep pace with cloud-native and security tool evolution and drive adoption of modern practices.
  • Attention to detail with a security-first mindset — anticipate abuse cases and design defenses that scale.
  • Project management and execution — run cross-team projects, manage stakeholders, and deliver secure platform features on schedule.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Security, or a related technical field — or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Cybersecurity, Computer Science, or related discipline is a plus.
  • Relevant certifications (CISSP, CSSLP, AWS Certified Security - Specialty, GCP Professional Cloud Security Engineer, CISM, OSCP) are highly desirable.

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 4–8+ years of combined experience in DevOps, cloud operations, and information security.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years working with cloud platforms and IaC in production environments.
  • Demonstrable experience integrating security tooling into CI/CD and automating remediation.
  • Prior experience securing Kubernetes at scale, running containerized workloads, and implementing runtime security controls.
  • Strong track record collaborating with development teams to shift security left and improve secure delivery metrics.
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