DevOps is more than just a job. It’s a mindset, a culture and a strategy whereby the Development and Operations teams work together to write software in small burst and then integrate, test, monitor and deploy code in short time periods. If you have seven minutes, this video breaks down DevOps and its benefits.
In the video, they define DevOps as follows: DevOps integrates developers and operations teams to improve collaboration and productivity by automating infrastructure, automating workflows and continuously measuring application performance.
Additionally, the benefits of DevOps oriented teams include:
-
Increased rate of software delivery → faster time to market
-
Automated infrastructure → maintain better business focus
If you’re on this page, you’re likely in need of someone to help you reap those benefits and build a DevOps oriented team. Learn more about what a DevOps Engineer does in the next section, or feel free to skip ahead to DevOps Engineer job description examples, a template and salary information below.
Table of Contents
- What Does A DevOps Do?
- Five DevOps Job Description Examples
- DevOps Job Description Template
- DevOps Writer Salary Information
Access our entire library of templates for your open roles.
What Does A DevOps engineer Do?
DevOps Engineers are the middle people that collaborate with the Development and Operations teams to build, test and deploy software in short, fast bursts.
While the DevOps concept is fairly new, it doesn’t require a hyper-specific background or knowledge to get into. Most DevOps Engineers have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Engineering, or they have prior experience writing script with Bash, Golang, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python or Ruby or working with Microsoft Linux or Amazon Web Services.
As we mentioned in the intro, DevOps is a strategy and mindset, and this role bridges a gap in traditional development, whereby Developers create software and Operations runs software exclusive from one another. The traditional strategy is also built around infrequent, large deployments of software, that lends itself to long phases of fixing unforeseen issues and software failures.
This image breaks down how the two teams can work together in phases to support the DevOps strategy. The eight main phases consist of:
-
Code → Plan → Monitor → Deploy → Build → Test → Release → Operate → Code
In order to be a successful DevOps Engineer, you need to have a wealth of knowledge and experience with different digital applications. Each of which are used at different stages in their process in order to:
-
Build and test code continuously with scripting and programming languages
-
Manage, track and document changes to code with source control tools
-
Deploy applications via automation with configuration management tools
-
Measure performance and environment of application with system & application log tools
The tools they need to know for each phase of the process should line up with the tools your Development and Operations teams currently use, so check with them when writing your job description to better understand which candidates to target.
Keep in mind that you may also come across additional tools on applications, so it’s important to be familiar with a range of tools. Here are some of the most common DevOps tools you may come across.
Scripting Languages:
Programming Languages:
-
Amazon Web Services: IAM, EC2, VPC, ELB, ALB, Autoscaling, Lambda
-
AWS Managed Products: EC2, ECS, ECR, Route 53, SES, Elasticache, RDS, Redshift
-
AWS Certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect, AWS Certified Developer, Certified DevOps Engineer, SysOps Administrator
System Administration:
Infrastructure-as-code:
-
Ansible, Azure, CFEngine, Chef, Cloudformation, Docker, Juju, NixOS, Puppet, (R)?ex, SaltStack, Sensu, Terraform, Vagrant
Configuration Management:
Version control Systems:
Containerizing & Clustering:
-
Compose, Docker, Dockerfiles, ECS, Helm, Kubernetes, Nginx, Vagrant
CI/CD Implementation:
Open Source Database:
-
Cassandra, CockroachDB, CouchDB, MariaDB, MongoDB, MySQL, MSSQL, Neo4j, PGAdmin, PostgreSQL, RDBMS, Redis, RethinkDB, SQLite, Timescale
NoSQL:
Monitoring Tools:
Networking concepts:
-
Firewalls, NAT, Port, Subnetting, VPC, VPNs
Operational:
-
HA, Backups
Five DevOps Job Description Examples
Phew, that was a lot of different tools. Now let’s see how companies incorporate essential tools into their job descriptions. Below are five real DevOps Engineer job descriptions from companies across the US. You’ll notice we have redacted some information to protect the privacy of the companies that originally posted them.
DevOps Engineer Job Description: Example 1
As a DevOps Engineer, you will be responsible for the design, development, testing, and deployment of products that help companies communicate with their customers in deep and personal ways.
Our technology stack is built in Scala, NodeJS, and Ruby on Rails, running on Cassandra, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, and Kafka. We containerize and deploy with Kubernetes on AWS. You will be responsible for service delivery, reliability, scalability, monitoring, and helping define all of this as immutable infrastructure-as-code.
What you will do:
-
Deploy and maintain critical applications on cloud-native microservices architecture
-
Implement automation, effective monitoring, and infrastructure-as-code
-
Deploy and maintain CI/CD pipelines across multiple environments
-
Support and work alongside a cross-functional engineering team on the latest technologies
-
Iterate on best practices to increase the quality & velocity of deployments
-
Sustain and improve the process of knowledge sharing throughout the engineering team
-
Have on call responsibilities in rotation with the engineering team
What will help you succeed in this role:
-
Experience maintaining and deploying highly-available, fault-tolerant systems at scale
-
A drive towards automating repetitive tasks (e.g. scripting via Bash, Python, Ruby, etc)
-
Practical experience with Docker containerization and clustering (Kubernetes/ECS)
-
Expertise with AWS (e.g. IAM, EC2, VPC, ELB, ALB, Autoscaling, Lambda)
-
Version control system experience (e.g. Git)
-
Experience implementing CI/CD (e.g. Jenkins, TravisCI)
-
Operational (e.g. HA/Backups) NoSQL experience (e.g. Cassandra, MongoDB, Redis)
-
Experience with configuration management tools (e.g. Ansible, Chef)
-
Experience with infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform, Cloudformation)
-
Bachelor or master’s degree in CS, or equivalent practical experience
-
Effective communication skills
DevOps Engineer Job Description: Example 2
[redacted] is seeking a hands-on DevOps Engineer who will lead the way for our DevOps environment. The ideal engineer will bring their experiences, best practices, and a collaborative attitude to help drive DevOps initiatives. To be successful, one must effectively communicate with our development and operations team to orchestrate the creation of solutions that can scale. The responsibilities include building a process for automation as well as contributing to the development of internal tools to achieve operational efficiency.
Responsibilities
-
As part of a team implement DevOps infrastructure projects
-
Design and implement secure automation solutions for development, testing, and production environments
-
Build and deploy automation, monitoring, and analysis solutions
-
Manage our continuous integration and delivery pipeline to maximize efficiency
-
Implement industry best practices for system hardening and configuration management
-
Secure, scale, and manage Linux virtual environments
-
Develop and maintain solutions for operational administration, system/data backup, disaster recovery, and security/performance monitoring
-
Continuously evaluate existing systems with industry standards, and make recommendations for improvement
Desired Skills & Experiences
-
Bachelor’s or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field
-
Understanding of system administration in Linux environments
-
Strong knowledge of configuration management tools
-
Familiarity with continuous integration tools such as Jenkins, Travis CI, Circle CI
-
Proficiency in scripting languages including Bash, Python, and JavaScript
-
Strong communication and documentation skills
-
An ability to drive to goals and milestones while valuing and maintaining a strong attention to detail
-
Excellent judgment, analytical thinking, and problem-solving skills
-
Full understanding of software development lifecycle best practices
-
Self-motivated individual that possesses excellent time management and organizational skills
Having one or more of the following is a plus
-
Experience with delivery of a SaaS product
-
Strong understanding of micro-services and related architectures
-
Knowledge of containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes
-
Knowledge of tools like Ansible, Puppet and Jenkins Pipeline
DevOps Engineer Job Description: Example 3
Ideal candidates for this position should possess a keen mind for solving tough problems with the ideal solution, partnering effectively with various team members along the way. They should be personable, efficient, flexible and communicative, possess a strong desire to implement change, growth, and maturity, and have a passion and love for what they do. This role comes with the opportunity to be a high performer within a department that’s fast-paced, dynamic, and quickly growing in all areas.
Responsibilities:
-
Strengthen our application and environment security, applying standards and best practices and providing tooling to make development workflows more secure
-
Create, maintain, and iterate on our CI/CD processes for new and existing services
-
Increase the sophistication of our alerting and escalation mechanisms
-
Keep up to date on modern technologies and trends and advocate for their inclusion within products when it makes sense
-
Help increase system performance with a focus on high availability and scalability
-
Propose, scope, design, and implement various infrastructure architectures
-
Work collaboratively with multiple agile teams to help deliver end-to-end products and features, seeing them through from conception to delivery
-
Continue to keep the lights on (day-to-day administration)
-
Help define, document, evolve, and evangelize high engineering standards and best practices across multiple areas
-
Move quickly and intelligently - seeing technical debt as your nemesis
Qualifications:
-
3+ years of professional experience as a DevOps / System Engineer
-
Fluent in Python and Python testing best practices
-
Experience working in and advocating for agile environments
-
Extensive experience working within AWS and with it’s managed products (EC2, ECS, ECR, R53, SES, Elasticache, RDS, Redshift, etc)
-
Strong experience working with automation tooling (Terraform, Ansible, etc)
-
Strong experience with containers (Docker, Compose, ECS, Kubernetes)
-
Strong experience with various managed and self-hosted CI/CD tooling (Jenkins, Travis, Drone, Mule, Spinnaker)
-
Strong understanding of DNS, TCPDUMP, CDNS, SSL, Git, Firewalls and networking concepts (VPC, subnetting, VPNs, etc).
-
Experience deploying microservice architecture, applications, and supporting services
-
Experience working on high-traffic, international systems
-
Familiar with software security best practices
-
Understanding of monitoring tools (Pagerduty, CloudWatch, Datadog, Sentry, etc)
-
Experience working within large-scale decoupled, service-oriented systems a plus
DevOps Engineer Job Description: Example 4
Join the [redacted] Technical Operations team as a DevOps Engineer. You’ll be focused on automation in Amazon Web Services (AWS) as we build and scale our online presence.
What we will want you to do:
-
Programmatically create infrastructure in AWS, leveraging Autoscaling Groups, Security.
-
Groups, Route53, S3 and IAM with Terraform and Ansible.
-
Ensure our systems are highly available and resilient.
-
Enable our product development team to deliver new code daily through Continuous.
-
Integration and Deployment Pipelines.
-
Protect our customer data with continuous security practices and monitoring.
Required skills:
-
Command line experience with Linux including writing bash scripts
-
Networking fundamentals
-
Programming in Python, Ruby, Java or similar
-
AWS operations experience
-
VPCs, ELBs, Route 53, RDS, Cloudwatch, IAM, EC2, Lambda, etc
-
Ability to learn and apply new technologies through self-learning
Desirable skills:
-
Configuration Management experience with Ansible or similar (Chef, Puppet, Salt)
-
Experience with Version Control Software (Git preferred)
-
AWS Certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect, AWS Certified Developer, AWS
-
Certified SysOps Administrator, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
-
Setup and management of a Kubernetes cluster, including writing Dockerfiles and Helm
-
Continuous Integration setup and administration
-
Release Engineering: deployment pipelines; continuous deployment
-
Open-source Monitoring experience (Sensu preferred)
-
Database administration of Postgresql or similar
-
Management of growing Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana stack
-
Architecting highly-available distributed systems
-
Participation in 24/7 on-call rotations for mission critical web systems
DevOps engineer Job Description: Example 5
We’re looking for a DevOps Engineer to help build the most sophisticated consumer advocacy AI, reaching millions of customers. You’ll be creating infrastructure on a multi-cloud platform (using AWS, Azure and GCP), while ensuring that mission critical systems are functioning securely and consistently.
Job Responsibilities:
-
Create a secure production infrastructure with thousands of resources across three cloud platforms
-
Design, develop and scale infrastructure-as-code
-
Establish SLAs for service uptime, and build the necessary telemetry and alerting platforms to enforce them
-
Architect and build continuous deployment pipelines
-
Create tools to empower developers to manage production infrastructure
Skills + Qualifications:
-
Experience protecting sensitive customer data including [redacted]
-
3+ years of DevOps experience in a Linux environment
-
2+ years of experience with either AWS, Azure or GCP
-
Deep understanding of TCP/IP, HTTP & HTTPS
-
Experience building platforms for monitoring & alerting
-
Understanding of encryption ciphers and key management
-
Strong programming skills in Javascript, Python, Perl, Ruby or Golang
Big Plus:
-
Infrastructure automation experience (Chef, Puppet, Ansible)
-
Experience with templating frameworks like Terraform, Cloudformation or Resource Template Manager
-
Experience managing a large RDBMS like MSSQL or MySQL
-
Knowledge of Linux Kernel fundamentals including job management, memory management, file systems, networking & debugging
-
A relentless security-first mindset. You think like an attacker
DevOps Job Description Template
Time to put your knowledge to the test, but don’t worry, we’re not leaving you empty handed. We’ve created a DevOps Engineer job description template with all the key information needed to write your responsibilities and requirements. Make sure to alter the language and customize it to better reflect your company and culture.
Company Bio
[Use this section to provide a high level overview of your company, culture, perks and benefits, career development opportunities and anything else that will get candidates excited about your company.]
Job Description
Responsibilities
-
Establish, maintain and evolve concepts in continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines for existing and new services.
-
Write clean, stable and safe code in short time frames and frequent increments.
-
Collaborate with Engineering and Operations teams to improve automation of workflows, infrastructure, code testing and deployment.
-
Identify systems that can benefit from automation, monitoring and infrastructure-as-code and develop and scale products and services accordingly.
-
Brainstorm new products, updates and solutions to continuously challenge and improve products, performance, system/data backup, security and customer experience.
-
Remain up-to-date on industry trends, share knowledge among teams and abide by industry best practices for configuration management and automation.
Requirements
-
Bachelor’s degree or the equivalent in experience in Engineering, Computer Science or related field.
-
X years professional experience in DevOps or Systems Engineer.
-
X years professional experience with Linux and GitHub.
-
X years professional experience with Amazon Web Services.
-
Prior experience with [insert relevant CI/CD Implementation tools].
-
Prior experience with [insert relevant infrastructure-as-code tools].
-
Prior experience with [insert relevant monitoring tools].
-
Prior experience with [insert relevant open source databases].
-
Prior experience with [insert relevant NoSQL software].
-
Prior experience with [insert relevant containerizing and clustering software].
-
Experience writing with [insert relevant scripting languages].
-
Experience writing with [insert relevant programming languages].
-
Knowledge of networking conception, including [insert networking concepts].
-
Strong interpersonal and communication skills.
DevOps engineer Salary Information
Finally, we’ve included the average DevOps salary information from seven of the top employment markets in the US. Feel free to click on the links below to gain insights of DevOps salary information by company size, years of experience, and more.
Cross Market Average Salary for a DevOps Engineer: $117,308
How to reduce turnover while increasing engagement and inclusion for remote employees.
