DevOps Job Description

DevOps Job Description

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

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:

Bash, Golang, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, Ruby

Programming Languages:

NodeJS, Ruby on Rails, Scala

Amazon Web Services:

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:

Linux

Infrastructure-as-code:

Ansible, Azure, CFEngine, Chef, Cloudformation, Docker, Juju, NixOS,

Puppet, (R)?ex, SaltStack, Sensu, Terraform, Vagrant

Configuration Management:

Ansible, Chef, Cloudformation, Pipeline, Puppet, Jenkins, SaltStack, Terraform,

Version control Systems:

GitHub

Containerizing & Clustering:

Compose, Docker, Dockerfiles, ECS, Helm, Kubernetes, Nginx, Vagrant

CI/CD Implementation:

AppVeyor, Circle CI, Drone, GitLab, Jenkins, Mule, Spinnaker, TravisCI

Open Source Database:

Cassandra, CockroachDB, CouchDB, MariaDB, MongoDB, MySQL, MSSQL, Neo4j,

PGAdmin, PostgreSQL, RDBMS, Redis, RethinkDB, SQLite, Timescale

NoSQL:

Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Kafka, MongoDB, Redis

Monitoring Tools:

CloudWatch, Datadog, Pagerduty, Sentry

Networking concepts:

Firewalls, NAT, Port, Subnetting, VPC, VPNs

Operational:

HA, Backups

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