Who is a DevOps Engineer? Key Responsibilities, Skills & Salary 2024

Who is a DevOps Engineer?

Who is a DevOps Engineer?

A DevOps engineer is known to be a highly competitive IT professional who usually works with software developers, system operators, production IT staff and oversee different code releases and deployments. This role especially calls for someone who has related hard and soft skills, and the ability to overcome all kinds of traditional barriers between development and operations.

To explain further, a DevOps engineer has to balance out everything in the entire software development life cycle. This includes maintenance, updates, deployment, coding, and related. He acts as a liaison between all the departments that are contributing to software development and maintenance.

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Key Responsibilities of DevOps Engineer

DevOps engineers have to complete a lot of tasks on daily basis and the amount of workload depends on the type of organization they work for. Not all organizations have same responsibilities for a DevOps engineer. Organizations want code features to be taken to production seamlessly without issues.

Primary requirement from a DevOps engineer is to create and maintain CI/CD pipeline for seamless deployment to happen.

Below we have listed down some of their important and common key responsibilities that you should know of;

Release engineering is considered to be a key responsivity of a DevOps engineer. He’ll build and deploy code changes effectively without any issue.
Write and maintain build as well as deploy scripts.
Automate CI(Continuous Integration) / CD(Continuous Deployment) pipeline.
DevOps Engineers also engaged in system administration like deployment and maintenance of server and network resources for smooth hosting of applications. It also depends that their organization is hosting on-premises or taking cloud services.
Develop a detailed plan for carrying out the set goals across departments.
Review software scripts and look for different ways to improve automation.
Update permissions and make sure that the server information is backed up regularly.

Required Qualification/Education:

To become a DevOps engineer, you would normally require a Bachelor’s degree in either computer science or computer engineering.
With that, a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering will also fulfill the requirement.

75% of the DevOps Engineers have a bachelor’s degree; whereas 20% hold a master’s degree.

Recommended Courses:

Google Cloud DevOps Engineer Professional Certificate

Google Cloud via Coursera
24,648+ students enrolled
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AWS Certified DevOps Engineer

Fernando Medina Corey via Pluralsight
10 hours of effort required!
Study Type: Self-paced

Continuous Delivery & DevOps

University of Virginia via Coursera
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What makes you qualified for this job?

If you wish to become a DevOps engineer and do this job really well, then there are some technical and general skills you need to possess. Note that the technical skills required by a DevOps engineer greatly depend on the team structure, technologies, and the toolsets being used by a certain organization.

In-depth understanding of CI/CD pipeline automation.
Sound knowledge of different CI/CD tools to automate testing/deployment.
Experience with CI/CD related tools like Jenkins, Git, SonarQube, Puppet, Ansible or Chef etc.
Knowledge of a couple of languages including Java, Python, Ruby, Node.js, PHP etc.
Able to write build/deployment scripts.
Experience with cloud technologies like AWS or google cloud if deployment is not on-premise.
A good understanding of the agile methodology and industry standards.
Understanding of system administration and application hosting.
A DevOps engineer must be observant in his area of work.
Similarly, a good understanding of the software development lifestyle from multiple perspectives is required.
Exceptional professional and leadership skills are good for growth.

Introduction to Devops: Practices and Tools

- - - The Linux Foundation via edX
    - 7 Weeks (2-3 hours Weekly) of effort required!
    - Course Type: Self Paced

In-demand Certifications:

Learn the essentials for mastering DevOps practices within the AWS ecosystem.

Top Companies/Organizations Hiring DevOps Engineers

DevOps is no doubt a great career in 2024 and beyond. So if you think you have interest in the crossover between development and operations then yes it could be a Ken-Thompson-level field for you.

Big companies like Deloitte, Amazon, IBM, Cognizant Technology Solutions, and Comcast etc. have huge demand of DevOps Engineers.

Being a DevOps engineer, you can work in sectors like banking, insurance, healthcare, hospitality, inventory management and many others.

DevOps Engineer Salary Statistics

In this section, we shall take a look at the annual salary statistics of DevOps engineers working in different major countries. These figures will give readers a good idea of how much DevOps engineers working in different countries are earning.