A DevOps Engineer sits at the intersection of software development and operations, responsible for building and running the pipelines, infrastructure, and tooling that let teams ship quickly and safely. They automate builds, tests, deployments, and environment provisioning; manage cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes/containers; set up monitoring, logging, and alerting; and embed security and reliability into the delivery process. Their job is to reduce friction between dev and ops, shorten lead time from code to production, improve system stability, and create a culture of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).
Why in demand
Need for faster, safer releases – Organisations want to deploy multiple times per day without breaking production, and DevOps engineers design the CI/CD pipelines and practices that make this possible.
Cloud and container adoption – As companies move to AWS/Azure/GCP, Kubernetes, and microservices, they need DevOps specialists to design, automate, and operate this more complex infrastructure.
Reliability and observability expectations – Users expect 24/7 availability; DevOps engineers implement monitoring, logging, alerting, and incident management tooling to help teams detect and fix issues quickly.
Cost and efficiency pressures – DevOps engineers optimise resource usage, automate repetitive work, and streamline environments, helping reduce cloud spend and operational overhead.
Security and compliance “by default” – With rising security and regulatory risks, DevOps roles increasingly include DevSecOps practices—baking security checks, policies, and compliance into the delivery pipeline.
Problems Solved
DevOps Engineers solve the problem of getting code from “works on my machine” to “reliably running in production” — over and over again, at high speed and low risk. Without DevOps, teams tend to suffer from slow, painful releases, fragile environments, unclear incident ownership, and spiralling cloud costs. DevOps Engineers design and run the CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, monitoring, and automation that make delivery predictable, observable, and safe, so product teams can focus on building features instead of fighting environments.
- Reduce deployment pain and risk – They build robust CI/CD pipelines, automated tests, and rollout strategies (blue/green, canary, feature flags) so releases become routine events instead of terrifying “big bang” nights.
- Standardise and automate infrastructure – Using infrastructure-as-code and configuration management, they remove snowflake servers and manual steps, making environments reproducible, auditable, and easy to scale.
- Improve reliability and incident response – They implement monitoring, logging, alerting, and on-call processes to quickly detect issues, diagnose them faster, and fix them before they impact too many users.
- Enable teams to move faster – By providing self-service tooling, templates, and platform services, they reduce bottlenecks and hand-offs, letting product teams spin up environments and deploy independently.
- Optimise cloud usage and cost – They tune autoscaling, rightsizing, and resource allocation so systems use just enough compute and storage, cutting wasteful cloud spend while maintaining performance.
- Embed security and compliance into the pipeline – They integrate security scans, policy checks, and compliance controls into build and deploy stages, reducing vulnerabilities and making audits easier and less disruptive.
Skills Needed
| Skill Category | Skills (comma-separated with importance /10) |
|---|---|
| Technical | CI/CD pipeline design & maintenance [10], Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, etc.) [9], Linux & shell scripting proficiency [9], Containers & orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) [9], Cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP) basics-to-intermediate [8], Networking & load balancing fundamentals [7], Traditional server admin (bare metal, on-prem) [4], Mobile/desktop UI development [1] |
| Digital & Data | Monitoring & alerting stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, etc.) [9], Centralised logging & log aggregation (ELK, Loki, etc.) [8], Metrics & time-series systems (SLIs, SLOs) [8], Version control & branching workflows (Git) [9], Basic SQL/queries for diagnostics [5], Data warehousing & BI tools [2] |
| Problem-Solving | Troubleshooting incidents under pressure [10], Root-cause analysis of infra & pipeline failures [9], Designing resilient rollback/rollout strategies [8], Capacity and performance bottleneck analysis [8], Formal optimisation/OR-style modelling [2] |
| Analytics | Interpreting reliability metrics (error rate, latency, availability) [9], Using dashboards to guide fixes & improvements [8], Tracking deployment & delivery metrics (lead time, change fail rate) [8], Reading cloud cost & usage reports [7], Advanced statistical analysis on metrics [3] |
| Communication | Writing clear runbooks, docs & incident reports [9], Concise updates during incidents & post-mortems [9], Explaining infra constraints to non-technical stakeholders [8], Clear comments/PR descriptions for changes [8], Public talks/blogs on DevOps/SRE topics [3] |
| Collaboration | Working closely with backend/frontend engineers [9], Partnering with security & compliance teams [8], Coordinating with product & delivery teams on releases [7], Pairing with developers to improve pipelines [7], Facilitating large cross-team workshops [4] |
| Leadership | Owning platform reliability & delivery practices [9], Driving adoption of DevOps culture & standards [8], Leading incident response & post-incident reviews [8], Mentoring engineers on automation & reliability [6], Formal line management of a big org [3] |
| Business | Understanding impact of downtime on revenue & CX [9], Awareness of cloud cost drivers & optimisation levers [8], Estimating effort & giving realistic timelines [7], Reading basic business KPI/OKR dashboards [5], Detailed P&L or pricing design [2] |
| Strategic | Evaluating and choosing tooling for CI/CD, monitoring, IaC [8], Contributing to platform/infra roadmap [8], Balancing reliability, speed & cost in long-term decisions [8], Identifying opportunities for shared platforms & self-service [7], Owning overall corporate strategy [1] |
| Customers | Empathy for developers as “internal customers” of the platform [9], Designing good self-service DX (templates, CLIs, portals) [8], Considering end-user impact of reliability/performance [7], Using feedback from support & users to prioritise work [6], Direct quota-carrying customer ownership [1] |
| Stakeholders | Setting expectations on reliability, SLAs & release cadence [9], Communicating risks, trade-offs & mitigation options [8], Working with vendors & cloud providers on issues [7], Presenting status & incidents in governance forums [6], Deep political manoeuvring for its own sake [2] |
| Adaptability | Implementing security-by-default in pipelines (secrets, scans) [9], applying change management & approval practices responsibly [8], ensuring auditability of deployments & infra changes [8], understanding compliance needs (ISO, SOC2, GDPR impact on infra) [6], Personally drafting full legal/compliance documents [2] |
| Governance | Implementing security-by-default in pipelines (secrets, scans) [9], applying change management & approval practices responsibly [8], ensuring auditability of deployments & infra changes [8], understanding compliance needs (ISO, SOC2, GDPR impact on infra) [6], personally drafting full legal/compliance documents [2] |