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DevOps Engineer Job Description (2026): Duties, Skills and Salary

A DevOps engineer builds and runs the systems that get code from a developer's laptop to production safely: CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, containers, monitoring and deployment automation. The aim is for teams to release often without breaking things, and to recover quickly when something does break.

The role blends software and operations. DevOps engineers write infrastructure as code with Terraform, Pulumi or CloudFormation, manage Kubernetes or another container platform, script in Python, Go or Bash, and work with developers on how services are built, deployed and observed. Most share an on-call rotation.

DevOps Engineer job description template

Copy it, replace everything in [brackets] and cut what doesn't apply. Keep the requirements to what the job really needs.

Template · replace the [brackets]

DevOps Engineer

[Company] · [City and office days, or remote with the countries or time zones you hire in] · [Full-time]

About [Company]

[Two or three sentences on what your company does, who it serves and why this team matters now.]

About the role

[Company] is hiring a DevOps engineer to own how we build, ship and run [product]. You'll look after our CI/CD pipelines, [AWS / Azure / GCP] infrastructure and Kubernetes clusters, and help developers deploy several times a day without fear.

What you'll do

  • Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines in [GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or Jenkins] for [number] services.
  • Manage cloud infrastructure on [AWS / Azure / GCP] with Terraform, reviewed like any other code.
  • Run and upgrade Kubernetes clusters, including networking, autoscaling and secrets.
  • Set up monitoring, logging and alerting in [Prometheus and Grafana, Datadog or similar], with a runbook for every alert.
  • Take part in on-call, lead incident response and write blameless postmortems.
  • Automate repetitive operational work and take the manual steps out of releases.
  • Work with security on patching, access control and compliance requirements.

What you'll bring

  • [X]+ years in DevOps, SRE, platform or systems engineering.
  • Hands-on experience with [cloud provider] and infrastructure as code (Terraform or equivalent).
  • Experience running containers in production with Docker and Kubernetes.
  • Scripting in Python, Go or Bash.
  • A solid grasp of Linux, networking (DNS, TLS, load balancing) and security basics.
  • Experience building pipelines that developers actually like using.

Nice to have

  • AWS Solutions Architect or Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) certification.
  • GitOps with Argo CD or Flux.
  • Experience managing a sizeable cloud bill.
  • Work under SOC 2 or ISO 27001.

What we offer

  • [Pay range: e.g. $X–$Y base salary, plus bonus or equity if offered]
  • [On-call pay, certification budget, home-office setup]
  • [Health cover, retirement or pension plan, paid time off, parental leave]
  • [Work authorization: whether you can sponsor a visa or hire through an employer of record]

[Our process: a recruiter call, a hands-on session debugging a broken deployment, a design conversation about infrastructure for a new service, and a meeting with the developers you'd support.]

[Your equal opportunity statement, and how candidates can ask for adjustments during the process]

Put the pay range in the ad. Several US states, including California, Colorado, New York and Washington, require it in job postings, and the EU Pay Transparency Directive gives applicants the right to know the starting pay or its range before the interview.

What real DevOps engineer job ads ask for

The skills named most often in the 485 newest DevOps engineer job ads we analyzed (out of 1,933 live postings), as the share of ads that mention each. A skill most ads name is a fair must-have; one few ads name belongs under nice-to-have.

  1. 1CI/CD82%
  2. 2Kubernetes67%
  3. 3Terraform67%
  4. 4Python63%
  5. 5AWS61%
  6. 6Infrastructure as Code61%
  7. 7Docker49%
  8. 8Linux45%

Degrees mentioned most: Bachelor's degree (26%), Computer Science (21%), Master's degree (8%).

From live job ads · computed November 2, 2026 · refreshed daily

DevOps Engineer duties by seniority

What the job usually looks like at each level. Pitch the ad at one level and say which in the title.

Junior

  • Maintains pipelines and infrastructure modules with guidance.
  • Handles routine requests such as new environments and access changes.
  • Shadows on-call before joining the rotation.

Mid-level

  • Owns pipelines, clusters or cloud accounts end to end.
  • Leads incident response for their systems and fixes root causes.
  • Removes toil and makes deployments faster and safer.

Senior

  • Designs the platform: environments, deployment strategy, observability and access.
  • Sets standards for infrastructure code, security and cloud cost.
  • Mentors engineers and agrees reliability targets with leadership.

DevOps Engineer career path

  1. Junior DevOps Engineer
  2. DevOps Engineer
  3. Senior DevOps Engineer
  4. Platform Lead or Head of Infrastructure

DevOps engineers usually come from system administration, software development or IT operations; few start here straight from school. Later paths include site reliability engineering, platform engineering (building internal developer platforms), cloud architecture, DevSecOps and infrastructure management.

Advertised pay for DevOps engineer jobs

Median advertised base salary in DevOps Engineer job ads in the United States: $164,800 (middle half: $137,900–$195,700), from 184 job ads with a published salary in the last 90 days.

This is advertised pay, not total compensation: bonuses, commission, equity and benefits aren't included, and many ads publish no pay at all.

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DevOps Engineer job description FAQ

What does a DevOps engineer do?

Builds and runs the pipelines and infrastructure that ship software: CI/CD, cloud resources defined as code, containers and Kubernetes, monitoring and alerting. They help developers release often and safely, and respond when production has problems.

Is DevOps a job title or a way of working?

Both. DevOps began as a way of working where developers and operations share responsibility for running software. In job ads it has become the title for engineers who build the pipelines, infrastructure and tooling that make that possible.

What's the difference between DevOps and SRE?

They overlap heavily. SRE, which started at Google, frames the work around reliability targets, error budgets and cutting toil with software, while DevOps roles lean toward CI/CD and infrastructure automation. Many companies use the titles for similar jobs.