What Does a DevOps Engineer Do?
In recent years, companies have realized the need for greater cooperation and understanding between development and operations teams. Out of that, the concept of DevOps was born. A DevOps engineer works with IT developers and business operations professionals to improve communications between the people who create software and IT solutions and those who figure out how those solutions and software will be used in the business.
A DevOps engineer has to manage the creation, improvement and development of software and coordinate how those solutions are deployed to users. DevOps engineers help organizations release software updates quickly and incorporate the feedback their departments receive from users. In addition to technical skills, a DevOps engineer must also have a strong understanding of the information exchange flow in an organization.
Since DevOps involves a culture change for most organizations, soft skills are crucial for DevOps engineers. They must be evangelists for the spirit of cooperation, and have the communication skills to keep both development and operations teams on the same page throughout the lifecycle of a particular project.
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National Average Salary
DevOps engineer salaries vary by experience, industry, organization size, and geography. To explore salary ranges by local market, please visit our sister site zengig.com.
The average U.S. salary for a DevOps Engineer is:
$128,280
DevOps Engineer Job Descriptions
The first step when hiring a great DevOps engineer is a well-crafted job description. Below are real-world examples to help give you the best chance of success on your recruiting journey.
Example 1
Because of our commitment to client satisfaction, [Your Company Name] has become one of the best companies in the industry. The key to this success is our steadfast belief in providing the best customer experience. We’re searching for an experienced DevOps engineer to join our team. As an ideal candidate, you have proven experience deploying product updates, identifying production issues, and integrating software functions that meet customers’ needs. You have a solid background in software engineering and good working knowledge of Ruby or Python.
Typical duties and responsibilities
- Implement and manage continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) systems and methodologies
- Design and maintain tools to automate operational processes
- Assist with the creation of automation scripts and declarative templates for provisioning cloud resources, rolling out tools and new features
- Help with monitoring systems and providing support
- Work with all teams to achieve business objectives
- Collaborate with engineering team members to detect, to resolve, and to enhance infrastructure problems
- Perform ongoing routine DevOps maintenance tasks
Education and experience
A bachelor’s degree in information systems or computer science, or a related field, as well as experience working with automated server configuration and deployment tools, are required for this position.
Proficiency working in Unix/Linux environments and experience with tools like Jenkins, Puppet, Chef, Gitlab, and Azure DevOps are strongly preferred.
Required skills and qualifications
- Expertise in infrastructure automation and testing via shell scripting and tools such as Chef, Puppet or Ansible
- Understanding of agile and other development processes and methodologies
- Effective verbal and written communication skills with management and peers
- Development expertise in Python, C#, Java, Node.js or similar
Preferred qualifications
- Master’s degree in computer science or software engineering
- Experience with software engineering, customer experience, and civil engineering
- Experience in team building and project organization
- Experience developing engineering applications
Example 2
The DevOps engineering role requires both compressive technical, process and people skills to educate technical and management teams to help drive new solutions to current processes and solutions.
What you’ll be doing
- Collaborate with diverse group of global infrastructure engineering/operations, security and application/database teams on designing new processes, workflows, and solutions to better automate the delivery of infrastructure and provide faster time to market for applications
- Design and implement new processes for automated deployments of on premise and cloud based infrastructure, microservices
- Establish center of excellence for DevOps through creation of education plans, coordination of internally and externally lead training efforts, and the creation standards and practices
- Contributes to process improvements across teams
What we’re looking for
- Requires well rounded prior experience and education involving programing, scripting, automation, and CI/CD pipelines
- Scripting knowledge such as ansible, terraform, and ARM
- Must be knowledgeable of Unix/Linux and Microsoft operating systems
- Extensive prior experience with cloud platforms
- Preferred experience with Azure Portal, Azure DevOps, PowerApps, Azure functions, scripted deployments, ARM templates
- Experience with Kubernetes, Redhat OpenShift, Azure Kubernetes, and Anthos
- Project Management Skills/Certifications desired
- Familiarity with Azure DevOps, Flexdeploy, BitBucket, Jenkins preferred.
- Excellent written and communication skills and comfortable working with both very technical teams as well as management and business customers
- Provides informal guidance to junior staff
- Works independently; receives minimal guidance
- Acts as a resource for colleagues with less experience
Experience and education
Typically requires 8+ years of related experience with a 4 year degree; or 6 years and an advanced degree; or equivalent work experience.
Example 3
We are seeking a DevOps Engineer who is passionate about DevOps, embraces infrastructure as code, supports CI/CD, and enjoys collaborating to produce high performing, maintainable solutions. As a DevOps Engineer, you will be responsible for the successful release and run time of revenue generating big data solutions and will focus on continuously improving, optimizing, and eliminating toil through automation. In addition to automating operations and managing infrastructure through code, you will work collaboratively with the product team, developers, and IT personnel to build, evolve, and scale our solutions to meet our growing business.
Key responsibilities
- Evaluates, automates, and optimizes processes, building infrastructure through code and streamlining pipelines, monitoring, and incident response processes, following industry standards and best practices
- Able to learn quickly and automate, integrate, deploy, or release solutions using tools, scripting, or coding as needed
- Continuously striving for improvement, evaluating new approaches, industry standards, new tooling, etc. and producing recommendations for improvements
- Maintains established SLAs, SLIs, SLOs, and monitors systems, assessing lead time for changes, change failure rate, deployment frequency, mean time to recover, and availability, striving for continuous operational improvement, and improved customer satisfaction
- Collaborates with development, participating in designs and assisting with optimizing system performance and right sizing environments
- Proficient at problem management including definition, brainstorming, and determining a resolution through collaboration
Experience and education
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Mathematics, or other equivalent experience
- 2-3 years experience in DevOps
- 2 years or equivalent experience in supporting high availability systems
- 2 years experience in cloud base technologies (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- 1 years experience working in Agile teams and CI/CD environments
- Experience with Bash, Python, or similar scripting
- Experience with Linux; experience with Windows is desired
- Experience with containers such as Docker, Kubernetes, etc.
- Experience with Jenkins, Airflow, or other orchestration tools
- Experience with code repositories such as Git, Bitbucket, Github, etc.
- Experience with Terraform or CloudFormation or other IaC tools
Soft skills
- Able to collaborate across organizations with all levels of leadership to evaluate and resolve issues
- Able to communicate well, documenting processes as needed
- Able to learn new emerging technologies quickly and apply innovative ideas to resolve problems
- Able to use a wide variety of open source technologies and tools
- Understanding of an object-oriented programming language
- Able to script and perform refactoring
- Able to manage frequent, incremental code testing, and deployment (CI/CD principles)
- Able to automate processes using automation tools and best practices
- Able to manage big data and data that scales
- Able to focus on results and business outcomes
- Understanding and focus on business outcomes
Example 4
We are looking to expand our team! We are looking for a DevOps/software engineer that likes to get out of their comfort zone to help build out new features and further scale our application to meet market demands.
Responsibilities
- Maintain/develop job automation and maintenance tasks
- Actively participate in the design and execution of new projects
- Provide support during deployments and operational incidents
- Improve infrastructure and application development
Skills
- 3+ years experience as a software engineer or DevOps engineer
- Software development experience (JavaScript/TypeScript. Go is a plus)
- Experience with container-based deployments (Docker/containerd/ECS/Fargate)
- Experience with SQL/document stores (Postgres/DynamoDB)
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code (CloudFormation/Terraform)
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS)
- Familiarity with a CI/CD tool (CircleCI/AWS CodePipeline)
- Familiarity on the *nix command line and shell scripting
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent professional experience
Candidate Certifications to Look For
- DevOps Engineer Master Certification. Offered by Simplilearn, the DevOps Engineer Master Certification proves candidates have the knowledge and skills in DevOps principles, such as configuration management, continuous integration, and deployment, delivery, and monitoring using DevOps tools. The certification also demonstrates their competency in operations management. Candidates should have a technical background and a basic understanding of Linux, web development, and Java programming. They should also be familiar with cloud platforms like AWS and Microsoft Azure.
- Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE). The RHCE is a senior-level certification and proves a candidate’s advanced skills with Linux, allowing them to stand above their peers. To earn an RHCE, candidates must earn a Red Hat Certified System Administrator certification and pass an exam. The RHCE demonstrates the knowledge required to automate the deployment, management, and support of multi-system environments.
- AWS Certified DevOps Engineer-Professional. This certification is administered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and shows a candidate’s knowledge of the operations and methodologies related to AWS and validates their ability to automate the testing and deployment of AWS infrastructure and applications. To earn a DevOps Engineer-Professional certification, they must pass an exam that covers such topics as SDLC automation, incident and event response, policies and standards automation, monitoring and logging, content management, and infrastructure as code.
Sample Interview Questions
- How is DevOps different from agile methodology? Which IT software are you proficient at using?
- What are some of the most popular DevOps tools?
- What are the different phases in DevOps?
- Can you name some of the core benefits of DevOps?
- What role does configuration management play in DevOps?
- How would you approach a project that needs to implement DevOps?
- What is the difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment?
- What is the role of AWS in DevOps?
- Can you name three important DevOps KPIs?
- What does the term “Infrastructure as Code” (IaC) mean as it pertains to configuration management?
- How would you implement IaC using AWS?
- What is the git command that downloads any repository from GitHub to your computer?
- How do you revert a commit that has already been made public?
- What is Jenkinsfile?
- What is the command to run Jenkins from the command line?
- What are the key aspects of the Jenkins pipeline?
- Can you explain the two types of pipelines in Jenkins, along with their syntax?
- How can you copy Jenkins from one server to another?
- What are the different Selenium components?
- How do you access the text of a web element?
