01Owns
CI/CD pipelines
Keeps builds fast with caching and parallel stages, runs tests and security scans where they catch issues early, and makes every deploy repeatable from a commit.
Hire · Delivery and operations
Hire DevOps Engineers
Senior DevOps engineers who join your team to make shipping software safe and boring: fast pipelines, reproducible container builds, Kubernetes workloads that roll out gradually and alerts that point at real user pain. Candidates have repaired a broken pipeline and run a mock incident in a paid trial before you meet them.
Trial includes a live mock incident
Senior, lead and SRE levels
Joins your on-call with agreed boundaries
On your team
What a DevOps engineer owns on your team.
02Owns
Container builds
Writes small multi-stage images with pinned bases, non-root users and SBOMs, and keeps them patched without breaking releases.
03Owns
Kubernetes operations
Manages manifests or Helm charts, resource requests, probes, autoscaling and upgrades, often through GitOps with Argo CD or Flux.
04Owns
Observability
Instruments services with metrics, logs and traces, defines service-level objectives and tunes alerts so pages mean something.
05Owns
Release safety and incidents
Introduces canary or blue-green rollouts, feature flags and fast rollback, and runs blameless reviews after incidents.
Measure delivery before hiring for it
Before writing the role, gather four numbers: how often you deploy, how long a change takes from merge to production, how often deploys cause an incident and how long recovery takes. They show where a DevOps engineer will help most, and they give you a baseline to judge the hire against later.
Ask candidates which of those numbers they moved in their last role and how. Specific answers about caching, trunk-based development or automated rollback are good signs.
Vetting
Skills we test before a DevOps engineer joins.
01Tested
Pipeline engineering
GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or Jenkins at scale: reusable workflows, secrets handling, caching and keeping main always deployable.
02Tested
Kubernetes in production
Debugging CrashLoopBackOff and OOMKilled pods, network policies, pod disruption budgets and safe cluster upgrades.
03Tested
Observability tooling
Prometheus and Grafana, OpenTelemetry instrumentation, structured logging and building dashboards around golden signals.
04Tested
Incident handling
Calm triage, clear roles and communication during an outage, and post-incident actions that actually get done.
05Tested
Supply chain security
Image scanning, signed artefacts, dependency pinning and least-privilege tokens for pipelines.
06Tested
Scripting and automation
Bash, Python or Go for tooling, and the judgement to delete a script once a platform feature replaces it.
Work sample
How the DevOps engineer work sample runs.
- 01Step 1
Fix a slow, flaky pipeline
The candidate receives a CI configuration that takes too long and fails intermittently, finds the uncached steps and the race condition, and fixes both.
- 02Step 2
Harden a deployment
They add probes, resource limits, a pod disruption budget and a canary strategy to a Kubernetes service, explaining each choice. The time is paid.
- 03Step 3
Run a mock incident
In a timed session, error rates spike after a deploy. We watch how they triage with dashboards and logs, communicate and decide to roll back.
- 04Step 4
Write the review
They write a short blameless incident review with timeline, contributing factors and two actions, readable by a product manager.
Levels
DevOps Engineers: what changes at each level.
01Level 1
Senior
Owns pipelines and deployments for several services, takes a share of on-call and reviews infrastructure changes from colleagues.
02Level 2
Lead
Sets release standards, alerting policy and on-call practices, and decides which platform tools the organisation adopts.
03Level 3
Site reliability engineer
Owns service-level objectives and error budgets, capacity planning and reliability work across critical services.
Senior, lead or SRE
A senior DevOps engineer adds capacity where pipelines and clusters already exist. A lead suits teams where every service deploys differently and alerts are ignored. Hire a site reliability engineer once reliability targets are a business commitment and someone needs to own error budgets and capacity.
Other options
When to hire someone other than a DevOps engineer.
01Consider
You need foundations, not pipelines
If accounts, networking and access control are the gap, start with a cloud engineer.
Open register02Consider
Everything runs on Azure PaaS
For teams deploying mainly to App Service and Functions, an Azure developer can own build and release too.
Open register03Consider
Release quality is the real problem
If deploys go out smoothly but bugs escape, a QA engineer will move the needle more.
Open registerWatching someone handle an incident
Configuration knowledge is easy to claim. Behaviour under pressure is not. Our mock incident shows whether a candidate checks recent changes first, communicates status while investigating and is willing to roll back before fully understanding the cause. Those habits shorten real outages.
Two things to fix first
Ask the new engineer to make rollback a single, tested action for your most important service. Fast recovery reduces the cost of every future mistake.
Next, review the alerts that paged someone last month. Delete or demote the ones that needed no action. A quieter pager makes the remaining alerts credible.
FAQ
Questions to resolve before the build.
01Will a DevOps engineer join our on-call rotation?
Usually yes, once they know your systems. We agree hours, escalation paths and handover expectations in advance so on-call is sustainable across time zones.
02Do we need Kubernetes to hire a DevOps engineer?
No. Plenty of teams run well on managed container services or virtual machines. A good DevOps engineer will tell you if Kubernetes would add more operational work than value for your size.
03How is this different from hiring a cloud engineer?
DevOps engineers focus on how code moves from commit to production and how it behaves once there. Cloud engineers focus on the accounts, networks and permissions underneath. The roles overlap at the edges and work best together.
Works alongside
Roles a DevOps engineer works best alongside.
01Pair with
Cloud engineers
Cloud engineers own accounts, networks and identity; DevOps engineers build delivery and operations on top.
Open register02Pair with
QA engineers
To decide which automated checks gate a release and which run after deploy.
Open register03Pair with
Golang developers
When internal tooling, operators or controllers need writing in Go and maintaining as real software.
Open registerProduct delivery
Need the whole product built instead?
Primary sources
References behind this page
Dated official documentation, standards, and research that support the factual claims on this page.
- 01Google SRE Book: Monitoring Distributed Systems
The golden signals and principles for alerting on symptoms.
- 02Kubernetes documentation: Configure Liveness, Readiness and Startup Probes
Official reference for health checks that make rollouts safe.
How to read this page
Scope, cost and timeline figures are planning guidance until confirmed in a written proposal. Diagrams and screens are illustrations, not client deliverables, and source-code rights and handover follow the signed agreement. See the delivery process and the full disclaimer.
Next decision
Turn the brief into an accepted product scope.
Define outcomes, constraints, evidence, rights and handover before delivery begins.
Commercial rights, repositories, environments, documentation, acceptance and handover remain contract-defined.