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Hire DevOps Developer or Engineer: Our Experience

Devops Engineer working on computer. testimonial
  • Discover what DevOps is, why it matters, and when to hire a DevOps engineer to streamline your software delivery and scale with confidence.
  • Learn how DevsData LLC helps companies build high-performing DevOps teams through real-world case studies, cost insights, and expert hiring strategies.

Hiring the right DevOps engineer engineer can make all the difference. From faster deployment cycles to smooth collaboration between development and operations, a skilled DevOps developer is often the missing link between building great software and delivering it securely, reliably, and at speed.

However, finding top DevOps talent is challenging, as these roles require in-depth technical expertise, knowledge of infrastructure, and strong communication skills. Combine that with the rapidly evolving landscape of development tools and technologies, where new frameworks, languages, and platforms emerge constantly, and global talent shortages, and it’s no surprise that many companies struggle to make the right hire.

The urgency is growing. As more businesses undergo digital transformation, the global DevOps market is expanding rapidly, projected to hit $37.1 billion by 2031, growing at a CAGR of 18.3%, according to KBV Research.

At DevsData LLC, we’ve helped both startups and global enterprises navigate these challenges, successfully recruiting and integrating the best DevOps professionals into mission-critical projects across industries.

In this article, we’ll walk you through:

  • What DevOps means in practice.
  • Key responsibilities and skill sets of a DevOps engineer.
  • Where and how to find the right candidates.
  • Our proven approach to DevOps hiring is rigorous vetting, flexibility, and deep technical insight.

Whether you’re scaling your engineering team, building your first CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery) pipeline, or aiming to reduce deployment bottlenecks, this article will help you hire DevOps talent with confidence.

What is DevOps?

At its core, DevOps is a mindset and methodology that brings Development and Operations together to deliver better software faster. Instead of working in isolated silos, DevOps encourages collaboration between teams to automate, monitor, and continuously improve the software delivery pipeline.

While DevOps combines the Development and Operations efforts, it’s more than just merging two departments into one. It represents a cultural and operational shift that emphasizes agility, accountability, and continuous delivery, supported by modern tools, practices, and cloud-native architectures.

Industry leaders like Amazon, Netflix, Meta, and Google have adopted DevOps to scale rapidly, minimize downtime, and respond to market demands faster. Automated processes, a focus on collaboration between development and operations, and tools such as AWS CloudFormation facilitate infrastructure management.

“Amazon has achieved a remarkably rapid deployment cycle, with an average of 11.7 seconds per deployment, thanks to a strong DevOps culture and the adoption of continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices.”

Today, DevOps is considered essential for organizations seeking to enhance deployment frequency, minimize change failure rates, and reduce lead times, all of which are crucial goals in a competitive digital environment.

Why DevOps exists

Traditional software development often suffers from fragmented workflows, where Development teams write the code, Operations teams deploy it, and security teams intervene only after issues arise. This siloed model leads to slow handoffs, delayed feedback, and high-risk deployments. DevOps was created to fix that.

By fostering a culture of collaboration and leveraging automation, DevOps enables teams to build, test, deploy, and monitor software more effectively and securely. The key principles of DevOps include:

  • Automation of repetitive tasks (testing, builds, deployments).
  • Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) for rapid, reliable code delivery.
  • Real-time monitoring and fast feedback to catch issues early.
  • Cross-functional collaboration across development, operations, and QA.
  • Security and compliance are integrated throughout the pipeline (DevSecOps).

The result? Faster releases, fewer bugs, greater resilience, and a more productive engineering team.

The DevOps lifecycle

DevOps is a continuous process that integrates Development and Operations to streamline software delivery. The table below indicates which steps are traditionally associated with Dev, Ops, or both, demonstrating how a combined DevOps approach enhances collaboration and efficiency:

Stage Description Team Involvement
Plan Establish clear business goals, technical roadmaps, and product priorities. This alignment ensures teams work toward measurable outcomes and reduces cross-functional friction. A joint initiative by Product Managers, Developers, and Ops teams to unify vision and direction.
Create Developers write and version code using Git-based workflows, ensuring collaboration, visibility, and clean change histories. Peer reviews maintain quality and encourage shared ownership. Led by developers, with active participation from senior engineers during code reviews.
Verify Automated testing (unit, integration, security) is integrated early in the pipeline to catch bugs before they escalate, enhancing both speed and reliability. Developers write tests, while QA engineers validate functionality across test layers.
Package Code and dependencies are packaged into consistent, reproducible builds, minimizing “it works on my machine” issues across environments. Developers and build engineers collaborate to ensure portability and version integrity.
Release Code is deployed using automated, controlled processes (e.g., blue-green deployments, canary releases), reducing downtime and enabling rapid rollbacks. DevOps engineers manage deployment pipelines, while developers validate production readiness.
Configure Environment-specific settings, secrets, and infrastructure parameters are managed centrally to prevent misconfigurations and support scalability. DevOps and infrastructure teams utilize tools such as Terraform or Helm to define and apply configurations.
Monitor Real-time metrics and logs provide visibility into app health, user behavior, and performance regressions. Alerts ensure a quick response to incidents. SREs lead the monitoring strategy, while developers and ops rotate on-call duties to handle issues.
Govern Enforces standards across the pipeline—from access control to auditing and compliance checks—ensuring systems stay secure and within regulatory bounds. Security, Ops, and Compliance teams work together to embed governance into every stage.

This shared lifecycle highlights how Development and Operations teams work together across every stage, from planning to governance, to create faster, more reliable software delivery pipelines. By breaking down silos and aligning responsibilities, DevOps helps organizations reduce delays, minimize errors, and respond to user needs more effectively.

Business impact of DevOps

DevOps isn’t just a methodology – it’s a strategic approach that empowers companies to move faster, maintain reliability, and gain a competitive edge.

DevOps transforms how software is built, tested, and delivered when done right. Organizations that adopt DevOps practices see tangible, business-level benefits, including:

  • Faster time to market: Accelerate release cycles and respond to customer needs quicker. Example: Amazon deploys code every 11.7 seconds, enabling rapid iteration and innovation.
  • Greater deployment stability: Reduce errors and rollbacks with automated, consistent processes. Netflix uses automated pipelines and chaos engineering to maintain high availability and minimize deployment risk.
  • Improved team collaboration: Break down silos between dev, ops, QA, and security. At Google, cross-functional teams embrace Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices to align engineering and operations.
  • Reduced downtime and faster recovery: Monitor in real-time, fix issues proactively, and recover quickly. Etsy reduced its mean time to recovery (MTTR) by implementing continuous deployment and real-time observability tools.
  • Seamless scalability: Expand systems across cloud or hybrid environments with confidence. Spotify relies on containerized microservices and DevOps culture to scale its platform globally while maintaining stability.

“According to the 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report by Google Cloud and DORA, elite DevOps performers experience 46 times more frequent deployments, 60 times fewer failures, and recovery times that are 168 times faster than those of low-performing teams.”

Whether launching your first release pipeline or scaling a global platform, DevOps enables a faster, more innovative, and more resilient way to deliver software.

Devops LifeCycle graphics. testimonial

What does a DevOps engineer do?

A DevOps engineer is the connective tissue of modern software delivery. They’re not just support staff or code contributors; they’re strategic enablers who bridge the gap between development, operations, and business goals, ensuring software is delivered quickly, reliably, and at scale.

By bridging development, operations, QA, and security, DevOps developers design and manage the processes, tools, and infrastructure that enable teams to release faster, recover faster, and scale smarter.

Here’s a closer look at what they actually do:

Core responsibilities of a DevOps engineer

  1. Infrastructure as code (IaC)

    DevOps engineers define infrastructure in code to make environments reproducible, testable, and version-controlled. Instead of manually configuring servers, they utilize tools such as Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or Pulumi to provision and manage cloud resources at scale. This enables consistent setup across development, staging, and production environments, reducing human error and accelerating environment deployment.

    For teams looking to plan or present their infrastructure visually, tools like CloudCraft are handy. CloudCraft enables users to drag and drop AWS components, such as EC2 instances, S3 buckets, or VPCs, onto a visual canvas, connect them, and add annotations with descriptions. It’s beneficial for business presentations, stakeholder demos, or onboarding new engineers, as it bridges the gap between technical architecture and visual clarity. CloudCraft diagrams can often be auto-generated from existing Infrastructure as Code (IaC), providing an up-to-date visual representation of your live system without manual effort.

    Devops Working graph with Data Warehouse, Web Application and Data Analytics Pipeline. testimonial

    Most IaC implementations are built on top of the major cloud providers:

    • Amazon Web Services (AWS) – The most widely adopted cloud platform, offering robust infrastructure services and native IaC tools like CloudFormation.
    • Google Cloud Platform (GCP) – Known for its advanced Kubernetes support, data analytics stack, and DevOps-friendly tools like Deployment Manager.
    • Microsoft Azure – Favored by enterprises for hybrid cloud capabilities, integration with Windows-based environments, and strong security/compliance offerings.

    While AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure dominate the cloud market, they aren’t the only viable options, especially when considering cost efficiency or regional accessibility. For instance, Oracle Cloud has gained traction as a surprisingly affordable and capable alternative, offering robust performance and enterprise-grade services at lower price points, which makes it particularly appealing to startups and budget-conscious enterprises.

    In Asia, Alibaba Cloud is widely adopted by local IT teams due to its deep integration with the regional ecosystem and strong infrastructure support across China and Southeast Asia. Other platforms, such as DigitalOcean, Linode, and Hetzner, also cater to specific niches, offering developer-friendly environments, lower costs, or privacy-driven hosting models.

    While Infrastructure as Code helps define your infrastructure, configuration management tools ensure it’s deployed and maintained in the correct state.

    • Ansible – A flexible, agentless configuration tool that automates deployment and IT tasks via YAML playbooks. It’s currently the most widely adopted solution in modern setups.
    • Chef and Puppet – Once industry leaders, these tools laid the foundation for infrastructure automation. While less common today, many large enterprises still use them.
    • Spacelift – A modern orchestration platform that builds on top of tools like Terraform, Pulumi, and Ansible to automate provisioning workflows and enforce policies.

    These tools are essential for repeatable, scalable infrastructure. They ensure system consistency, reduce configuration drift, and support compliance across cloud or hybrid environments.

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  3. CI/CD pipeline management

    CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (or Deployment). It is one of the foundational practices in DevOps and plays a critical role in speeding up software development while maintaining high code quality and stability.

    • Continuous Integration (CI) is the process of automatically building and testing code every time a developer commits a change. This enables teams to identify bugs early, minimize integration issues, and maintain a stable codebase.
    • Continuous Delivery (CD) extends Continuous Integration (CI) by automatically deploying code changes to staging or production environments after they pass tests. This enables teams to release features, bug fixes, and configuration changes frequently and reliably.

    DevOps engineers set up and manage CI/CD pipelines using a variety of platforms, including:

    • GitHub Actions – GitHub’s native CI/CD tool, tightly integrated with the version control workflow.
    • GitLab CI/CD – A full DevOps platform that offers seamless CI/CD alongside code hosting and issue tracking.
    • CircleCI – Known for speed and scalability, widely used in cloud-native application pipelines.
    • Jenkins – One of the oldest and most flexible CI/CD tools, open source with thousands of plugins.
    • Travis CI – A Lightweight CI/CD platform that integrates with GitHub and is often used in open-source projects.
    • Bitbucket Pipelines – Atlassian’s CI/CD tool integrated with Bitbucket repositories and Jira workflows.

    Another widely used platform is Azure DevOps, Microsoft’s comprehensive DevOps solution that integrates project management, version control, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), artifact management, and automated testing into a single ecosystem. It includes services like Azure Boards (for agile project tracking), Azure Repos (Git version control), Azure Pipelines (CI/CD), Azure Artifacts (package management), and Azure Test Plans.

    Azure DevOps is especially favored by enterprise teams already integrated into the Microsoft ecosystem, offering robust support for hybrid cloud environments and seamless integration with tools such as Visual Studio, Microsoft Teams, and Active Directory. It’s ideal for teams looking to manage the whole software lifecycle, from planning and coding to building, testing, and deploying, under one roof.

    While cloud services are often the default choice for early-stage startups and growing teams, they aren’t always the most economical solution in the long run. For mature or resource-intensive projects with predictable workloads, it can be more cost-effective to migrate infrastructure away from the cloud.

    Large companies, such as 37signals (Basecamp) and Dropbox, have publicly shared their decisions to leave major cloud providers in favor of self-managed, on-premises infrastructure. This approach reduces reliance on third-party pricing models and can lead to substantial savings when cloud spend becomes disproportionately high relative to system stability and usage.

    DevOps engineers are often at the center of such strategic infrastructure transitions—evaluating cost structures, planning migrations, and ensuring the reliability, security, and scalability of the resulting environments.

  4. Automation everywhere

    DevOps engineers automate anything that can be automated, from security scans to backup rotations. They reduce repetitive manual tasks by scripting workflows and leveraging tools like Ansible, Chef, or custom Python/Bash scripts.

  5. Monitoring & logging

    Modern DevOps engineers rely on powerful observability tools to ensure infrastructure and applications remain performant, available, and secure. Here are some of the most widely used tools in production environments:

    • Prometheus – A metrics-based monitoring system that collects time-series data and provides flexible alerting. It’s ideal for dynamic cloud-native environments.
    • Grafana – A visualization platform that integrates with Prometheus and other data sources to create interactive dashboards and real-time monitoring views.
    • Kibana – A part of the ELK stack, used to explore and visualize logs stored in Elasticsearch.
    • Logstash – A data processing pipeline that ingests, transforms, and ships logs to systems like Elasticsearch.
    • Datadog – A commercial monitoring platform offering full-stack observability, log aggregation, and APM.
    • New Relic – Provides end-to-end visibility and application performance monitoring, with deep integrations and real-time diagnostics.
    • Splunk – Specializes in log management and big data analytics, often used for compliance and security monitoring.
    • Trino – A fast, distributed SQL query engine used for big data analysis across heterogeneous sources. Useful for advanced operational analytics.

    Many DevOps teams utilize combinations of these tools, e.g., Prometheus and Grafana, or ELK and Trino, to cover monitoring, alerting, log correlation, and long-term storage.

  6. Security & compliance (DevSecOps)

    Security isn’t just the final step – it’s integrated from the start. DevOps engineers implement automated security checks throughout the pipeline, including scanning code for vulnerabilities, checking for secrets in repositories, enforcing access policies, and ensuring compliance with standards such as SOC 2 or GDPR.

  7. Containerization & orchestration

    DevOps engineers package applications in containers (typically using Docker) to ensure consistency across environments, from development to production. Containers encapsulate application code, dependencies, and configurations into a single lightweight unit that can run reliably anywhere.

    To manage and scale these containers in production, DevOps teams use container orchestration platforms. The most common choices include:

    • Kubernetes – An open-source platform that automates deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It’s particularly popular in Europe and with companies that value open standards, flexibility, and strong community support. Kubernetes allows engineers to define desired system states and handles the rest, autoscaling, self-healing, and load balancing, at scale.
    • AWS CloudFormation – While not a container orchestrator in the strictest sense, CloudFormation plays a central role in infrastructure management, particularly in the US market. It enables DevOps teams to define AWS infrastructure (including ECS clusters, Fargate containers, IAM roles, VPCs, and more) in declarative JSON or YAML templates. This Infrastructure as Code approach ensures repeatable, secure, and version-controlled deployments within the AWS ecosystem. We observe that CloudFormation is especially prevalent among US-based teams, where AWS adoption is highest, whereas Kubernetes remains dominant in European tech stacks.

    In both cases, the goal is the same: seamless, scalable deployment pipelines that reduce friction, minimize manual configuration, and ensure reliability in complex, distributed environments.

  8. Collaboration across teams

    DevOps specialists don’t work in a vacuum. They’re the glue between developers, QA, security, and product teams – often leading sprint planning discussions, improving feedback loops, and ensuring the engineering team isn’t blocked by infrastructure or release issues.

    “In high-performing organizations, everyone within the team shares a common goal – quality, availability, and security aren’t the responsibility of individual departments, but are a part of everyone’s job, every day.” – Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook

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DevOps in AI & data science projects

In AI and data science projects, DevOps engineers play a crucial supporting role. While data scientists and AI specialists focus on building, training, and fine-tuning models, it’s the DevOps professionals who create and manage the infrastructure that enables these experiments to run efficiently and at scale.

Their work involves provisioning cloud resources, often GPU-enabled instances or scalable storage solutions, tailored to the computational needs of machine learning workflows. They also set up containerized environments, automate experiment tracking with tools like MLflow or Weights & Biases, and build CI/CD pipelines adapted for model versioning, data updates, and deployment.

One of the key responsibilities is ensuring reproducibility across environments. By leveraging Infrastructure as Code (IaC), containerization, and artifact storage systems, DevOps engineers ensure that training environments are consistent and models can be retrained or audited as needed.

In production, they also help monitor deployed models for performance, latency, or data drift issues, ensuring that AI systems remain reliable and deliver business value. This growing overlap between DevOps and machine learning operations is often referred to as MLOps, and it’s becoming essential for scaling AI capabilities within modern engineering teams.

Why is this role so critical?

Without DevOps, even the best teams hit friction points:

  • Slow, error-prone deployments that delay updates and disrupt delivery timelines.
  • Inconsistent environments that cause “it works on my machine” bugs.
  • Security vulnerabilities that surface late in the process.
  • Siloed teams that waste time on miscommunication.

A solid DevOps engineer eliminates these bottlenecks by:

  • Automating critical workflows.
  • Aligning team operations.
  • Creating fast feedback loops.
  • Making systems stable, scalable, and secure.

Related roles: SRE, MLOps, and DevSecOps

DevOps vs. SRE (Site Reliability Engineering)

While both roles aim to improve software reliability and delivery speed, DevOps is a cultural and process philosophy, whereas SRE is a specific implementation of those principles, popularized by Google.

  • DevOps engineers build and maintain CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, monitoring systems, and cross-team collaboration processes.
  • SREs focus on system reliability, uptime, and scalability, often using SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, and incident response playbooks.

DevOps vs. MLOps

MLOps (Machine Learning Operations) is an evolution of DevOps tailored to the ML model lifecycle.

  • While DevOps focuses on software delivery pipelines, MLOps manages data pipelines, model versioning, retraining, and deployment of ML models in production.
  • MLOps engineers ensure collaboration between data scientists, engineers, and ops teams, often using tools like MLflow, Kubeflow, or SageMaker.

What is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps is an extension of DevOps that integrates security practices directly into the software delivery pipeline rather than treating them as an afterthought. It shifts the traditional model, where security reviews happen post-development, to one where security is embedded into every phase of the SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle).

Instead of slowing down releases, DevSecOps emphasizes automation and collaboration to make security seamless, proactive, and continuous.

What DevSecOps includes:

  • Automated code scanning: Static Application Security Testing (SAST) is applied during development to catch issues early.
  • Dependency and vulnerability checks: Tools like OWASP Dependency-Check or Snyk are used to identify known vulnerabilities in third-party libraries.
  • Secrets management: Ensures sensitive data like API keys or credentials are not exposed in code or build environments.
  • Policy enforcement and compliance: Built-in controls validate access permissions, audit trails, and regulatory requirements (e.g., SOC 2, GDPR) throughout the CI/CD process.

How it relates to DevOps:

DevSecOps shares the core DevOps principles, including automation, CI/CD, rapid feedback loops, and team collaboration, but adds a security mindset from the outset. While DevOps focuses on speed and reliability, DevSecOps balances those priorities with built-in safeguards and risk mitigation strategies. DevOps gets your software out fast. DevSecOps makes sure it’s secure when it gets there.

DevOps hiring models

When it comes to hiring a DevOps engineer, there’s no universal blueprint. The ideal hiring model depends on several factors: The size and maturity of your team, the urgency of your needs, your internal capacity to manage talent, and, of course, your budget.
Here’s a closer look at the most common DevOps hiring models and when each makes the most sense.

In-house DevOps engineer

Hiring a full-time, in-house DevOps developer is often the go-to choice for companies building long-term products that require deep institutional knowledge and ongoing infrastructure evolution. This model is ideal for startups with stable funding or mid-sized tech firms scaling their platform with dedicated internal teams.

An in-house engineer becomes integral to your company culture, contributing to delivery and architectural decisions, tooling choices, and team processes. However, the recruitment process can be slow, and you’ll need strong internal tech leadership to mentor and manage the specialist. Salaries for experienced DevOps talent, especially in North America or Western Europe, can also be high, with added benefits, hardware, and training costs.

Many early-stage startups, especially pre- or post-MVP, choose to delay hiring a full-time DevOps engineer altogether. Instead, they opt to overpay slightly for cloud infrastructure and use developer-friendly platforms like Heroku or Render, which handle most deployment, scaling, and monitoring automatically.

While these platforms are relatively expensive on a per-resource basis, they eliminate the need for a complex DevOps setup, saving both time and headcount. For a small team shipping fast, this trade-off often makes sense – the total cost of using Heroku may still be lower than hiring a full-time DevOps specialist.

At DevsData LLC, we often recommend such platforms to startups in their early stages. They allow teams to stay lean while maintaining CI/CD and deployment reliability and leave room to bring in DevOps talent once infrastructure complexity justifies the investment.

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Outsourced DevOps team (via agency or firm)

Outsourcing DevOps to an external firm can be an efficient and effective option for companies that need to move quickly, migrate infrastructure, or audit their current delivery pipeline. This model is especially useful if you lack in-house expertise or need help implementing complex DevOps practices, such as CI/CD pipelines, IaC, or Kubernetes orchestration.

Specialized partners like DevsData LLC offer pre-assembled DevOps teams or highly experienced individual engineers who can integrate seamlessly into your existing processes, accelerating delivery while maintaining reliability and scalability.

However, this approach may reduce day-to-day control, and communication can become challenging without well-defined expectations and workflows. Thorough vetting of the partner is crucial, as trust and transparency are imperative in outsourced models

Staff augmentation

Staff augmentation offers the best of both worlds: Fast access to vetted DevOps engineers without the time, cost, and commitment of full-time hiring. Through this model, you bring in external developers who work as integrated members of your internal team, collaborating with your devs, participating in sprints, and aligning with your processes.

At DevsData LLC, we also specialize in this approach. Our clients often use staff augmentation to scale up rapidly during product launches, backfill urgent gaps, or bring in senior-level expertise on demand.

Why Choose DEVSDATA LLC testimonial

Freelancers

Freelancers are a good fit for short-term projects or specific tasks, such as setting up a GitLab CI pipeline, configuring AWS environments, or migrating infrastructure from legacy systems. This budget-friendly and flexible model makes it appealing to early-stage startups.

But with flexibility comes risk. Freelancers often juggle multiple clients, and availability can be unpredictable. You also miss long-term ownership, continuity, and deep integration into your team’s workflow. Quality varies, and without technical oversight, hiring the wrong freelancer can cost more than you save.

Criteria In-House Outsourced Staff Augmentation Freelancers
Cost High (salaries, benefits, training) Medium (project-based fees) Medium (scalable, no long-term commitments) Low (hourly/project rates)
Maintenance Cost High (ongoing salaries, hardware) Medium (contractual, project-based) Medium (flexible contract terms) Low (one-time payments)
Training Needs High (requires continuous upskilling) Low (partner handles it) Low (expertise provided) Medium (varies by freelancer)
Scalability Moderate (limited to internal resources) High (scalable based on contract) High (scalable as needed) Low (dependent on availability)
Control High (direct management) Medium (requires clear communication) High (integrated into internal team) Low (limited to task scope)
Best For Long-term projects, core infrastructure Short-term projects, complex audits Rapid scaling, product launches, and senior expertise Specific tasks, short-term needs

Staff augmentation offers the best balance of cost-efficiency, flexibility, and control for many organizations, especially when rapid scaling or senior-level support is needed.

At DevsData LLC, we support a full spectrum of DevOps engagement models:

  • Staff augmentation for embedding experienced engineers directly into your team.
  • Fully outsourced DevOps teams for hands-off execution and large-scale transformations.
  • And freelancer-style placements for targeted, short-term tasks with tight timelines.

Whichever model you choose, our experienced DevOps engineers are an extension of your team, focused on delivering stable, scalable, and efficient infrastructure.

Should you work with a recruitment agency?

Partnering with a specialized recruitment agency can be a smart move, especially when hiring DevOps engineers for critical infrastructure roles. But it’s important to understand both sides of the equation:

Advantages Disadvantages
Access to vetted talent: Agencies have pre-screened databases of experienced DevOps engineers. Upfront cost: Placement or success fees may be higher than in-house recruiting, often 15–25% of annual salary.
Faster hiring process: Specialized recruiters can source and screen candidates in days, not months. Less visibility into sourcing: You rely on the agency’s outreach strategy unless it is aligned.
Handled technical vetting: Reputable firms (like DevsData LLC) test for infrastructure, CI/CD, and DevSecOps knowledge. Inconsistent quality between agencies: Outcomes can vary widely depending on the recruiter’s expertise.
Flexible models: Agencies often offer staff augmentation, permanent hires, or contractors to match your timeline and budget. Onboarding may take time: External hires might need longer to adapt to internal tools or workflows.

Use recruitment agencies when speed, specialization, or hiring bandwidth are your biggest constraints, especially for DevOps roles requiring both deep technical skill and soft-skill alignment.

What we recommend

If you’re still searching for qualified DevOps engineers, several platforms can serve as strong starting points. Indeed remains one of the largest global job boards, offering advanced search filters and high candidate reach. For remote-first teams, We Work Remotely connects companies with experienced DevOps professionals worldwide. In Europe, especially Central and Eastern regions, Just Join IT is a trusted tech-focused platform.

Beyond job boards, companies often turn to software development agencies that offer ready-to-deploy DevOps teams or individual experts for hands-on delivery. Another effective option is to collaborate with specialized recruitment agencies (like DevsData LLC) that handle sourcing, technical screening, and team fit, significantly accelerating hiring timelines.

Each hiring avenue offers a different balance of speed, cost, and control. The right path depends on your internal capabilities, project urgency, and long-term scaling goals.

DevOps salary and cost breakdown

Hiring a DevOps engineer isn’t just about technical skill – it’s a strategic investment. And that investment can vary dramatically depending on the location, experience level, and employment model. Here’s what to expect in 2025:

Global DevOps engineer salaries

Country Average Annual Salary (USD)
United States $135000
Canada $92000
United Kingdom $82200
Germany $81000
India $42000
Romania $55100
Ukraine $35000 – $40000
Brazil $30000 – $45000

Note: Currency conversions are approximate and subject to exchange rate fluctuations.
Sources: Glassdoor (accessed: 04/16/2025)

Cost factors to consider

When budgeting for DevOps resources, several variables influence the final cost. Understanding these can help you make informed trade-offs between price, expertise, and availability:

  • Experience level: Junior engineers earn significantly less but may lack critical infrastructure or CI/CD expertise. Senior engineers with 5+ years of experience typically command higher rates due to their depth of knowledge.
  • Engagement model: Full-time hires require long-term commitment, benefits, and overheads. Freelancers or contractors offer flexibility, but may cost more per hour.
  • Geography & cost of living: Talent in North America and Western Europe is more expensive than in Eastern Europe, Latin America, or South Asia.
  • Project complexity: More advanced DevOps stacks (e.g., Kubernetes, Terraform, security automation) require higher expertise and budget.
  • Time zone alignment: Working with engineers in overlapping time zones improves collaboration, but the cost impact depends on your base location. For example, US-based companies may pay a premium for local talent, while Indian firms could find more affordable options within nearby regions.

Common challenges & lessons learned

Hiring a DevOps engineer isn’t just about finding someone who knows how to deploy code or set up automation tools.

“The right DevOps hire isn’t just a technician – they’re a strategic partner who builds stability, scalability, and speed into your delivery process.”

And yet, even the most forward-thinking companies often make the same mistakes. After working with startups and enterprises across industries, here are the most common DevOps hiring pitfalls we’ve encountered and the lessons we’ve learned along the way.

Waiting too long to hire

One of the most frequent mistakes? Waiting until you’re buried in tech debt, patching systems at midnight, or manually deploying fixes during peak traffic hours.

What we’ve seen: Companies often delay hiring DevOps talent until it becomes a crisis. But by that point, issues have compounded – CI/CD is fragile, logs are unreadable, and nobody trusts deployments.

What works: Hire proactively. Even part-time or fractional support early on can establish the groundwork, setting up pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and observability. These foundations will pay dividends as your team grows.

Blurring roles & responsibilities

It’s tempting to write a job description that includes every infrastructure-related keyword – DevOps, SRE, backend, security, data engineering. Why hire one person when you can employ five in one?

What we’ve seen: Overloaded job specs confuse candidates and result in poor fits. The team hires someone who is spread too thin, or worse, with strengths that don’t match the actual need.

What works: Get clear about your goals. Do you need someone to architect infrastructure? Manage releases? Optimize Kubernetes? Once you know what you need, you can hire someone who excels in automating CI/CD pipelines, scaling cloud environments, or improving deployment reliability.

Lesson: Focus beats a Generalist. A strong DevOps developer in the proper role will outperform a buzzword-loaded “unicorn” every time.

Overlooking soft skills

Certifications look shiny on paper. Experience with Terraform, Kubernetes, and AWS is great. But can they translate a production incident into clear next steps for a dev team? Can they align infrastructure strategy with product goals?

What we’ve seen: Prioritize soft skills alongside technical ability. DevOps is naturally collaborative—look for engineers who can communicate clearly, ask the right questions, and proactively support others.

What works: Get clear about your goals. Do you need someone to architect infrastructure? Manage releases? Optimize Kubernetes? Once you know what you need, you can hire someone who excels in automating CI/CD pipelines, scaling cloud environments, or improving deployment reliability.

Lesson: Don’t hire automation professionals who can’t align with people. DevOps relies on feedback loops, and humans play a critical role in the whole system.

Toolchain overload

It’s easy to fall into the trap of adopting every trending DevOps tool – until your workflows become a tangled mess of duct-taped scripts, disconnected dashboards, and five teams all using different CI systems.

What we’ve seen: Many teams bring on DevOps hires who are tool specialists, not systems thinkers. Without someone to oversee and align the toolchain strategy, pipelines become fragmented, ownership is unclear, and problems get blamed on tools instead of gaps in process or communication.

What works: Hire for strategic thinking, not just tool familiarity. The right engineer will consolidate workflows, advocate for integrations that support team-wide visibility, and establish standards everyone can follow. Tools like GitLab or GitHub Actions are only effective when implemented with a clear, unified vision.

“DevOps is not a goal, but a never-ending process of continual improvement.” – Jez Humble, co-author of “Continuous Delivery”

Treating security as a post-release problem

Security often gets treated as an afterthought, tagged on at the end of the release cycle, or worse, only after deployment. That’s a recipe for late-stage vulnerabilities, compliance failures, and avoidable crises.

What we’ve seen: Companies hire DevOps engineers with strong deployment skills but overlook security experience. Without someone who understands DevSecOps principles, teams scramble to fix issues after audits or production incidents, wasting time and risking their reputation.

What works: Hire engineers who treat security as a first-class citizen in the delivery process. The right candidate will know how to integrate automated security checks, enforce secret management policies, and bake compliance into CI/CD pipelines.

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Limiting your talent pool

Some companies still assume they need someone local, in-office, and available 9-to-5 in their time zone. This mindset drastically limits access to top-tier DevOps talent in a post-remote world.

What we’ve seen: Teams struggle to fill roles for months, overlooking exceptional engineers in Eastern Europe, LATAM, or Asia who bring the same (or better) quality, often at a fraction of the cost.

What works: Expand your reach. Use trusted partners like DevsData LLC to access vetted, remote DevOps engineers who’ve worked with top-tier companies across the globe.

Lesson: The best engineer for your team might not live in your city, but they could be one vetted Slack call away.

Hiring the wrong DevOps specialist can have far-reaching consequences. A poorly designed infrastructure may lead to a suboptimal cost structure, with unnecessary cloud spend, over-provisioned resources, or inefficient architecture driving up operational expenses. Performance can also suffer. Misconfigured CI/CD pipelines, lack of observability, or inadequate scalability planning can slow down development cycles and impact user experience.

Perhaps most critically, a DevOps hire without strong security awareness can expose the company to serious risks. Missing access controls, unsecured secrets, and poor patching practices can leave infrastructure vulnerable to breaches. That’s why hiring DevOps professionals with both technical depth and strategic foresight isn’t just helpful – it’s essential for long-term operational efficiency and resilience.

Why leading teams choose DevsData LLC for DevOps hiring

DevsData LLC website screenshot

Website: www.devsdata.com
Team size: ~60 employees
Founded: 2016
Headquarters: Brooklyn, NY, and Warsaw, Poland

Hiring the right DevOps engineer isn’t just about checking technical boxes – it’s about avoiding costly missteps like toolchain chaos, post-release security scrambles, and mismatched team dynamics. At DevsData LLC, we’ve spent years helping companies navigate these exact challenges by delivering DevOps professionals who don’t just fit, they elevate the engineering culture.

Founded in 2016, DevsData LLC is a fully licensed and government-approved recruitment agency headquartered in New York and Warsaw, with a global presence across Latin America, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe. Our proprietary database includes over 65000 rigorously vetted IT professionals, many with deep expertise in cloud infrastructure, automation, DevSecOps, CI/CD, and systems architecture, exactly the kinds of talent needed to avoid the common pitfalls outlined in this article.

What truly sets us apart is the rigor of our vetting process. Every candidate undergoes:

  • A 90-minute technical interview simulating real-world scenarios.
  • Infrastructure and security assessments tailored to high-stakes roles.
  • Soft skills and communication testing are also needed to ensure team integration and workflow alignment.

We don’t just forward resumes; we deliver trusted professionals who can consolidate toolchains, build security into your pipelines from day one, and drive stability, scalability, and speed. Clients pay only upon successful placement, and we back every hire with a guaranteed period, ensuring long-term value and peace of mind.

Matt_Wiklo testimonial

With over 80 clients worldwide, including Skycatch, Novartis, Varner, and Cubus, and a 5/5 rating on platforms like Clutch and GoodFirms, DevsData LLC is a proven partner for fast-moving companies that can’t afford DevOps hiring mistakes.

Case study

At DevsData LLC, we’ve partnered with startups, scale-ups, and enterprises across the globe to build resilient DevOps capabilities. One standout example is a collaboration with a San Francisco-based tech company that urgently needed to modernize its infrastructure and scale its CI/CD operations to support rapid growth.

The company was under pressure: Deployments were manual and unreliable, staging and production environments constantly drifted out of sync, and there was limited visibility into system performance. With a small internal team and a fast-approaching launch deadline, the situation was becoming unsustainable.

We stepped in with a targeted solution – assigning a senior DevOps engineer from our vetted network, who immediately integrated into their team. Over a few weeks, we rebuilt their CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions and Docker, replaced ad-hoc scripts with Infrastructure as Code via Terraform and AWS, and deployed Kubernetes to enable scalable container orchestration. We also implemented Prometheus and Datadog for real-time observability and introduced security checks directly into the delivery process.

The transformation was measurable: Deployment durations decreased from nearly two hours to less than 15 minutes. Downtime was reduced by 40%, while infrastructure scaling was 80% faster. Most importantly, their developers could now focus on product features rather than battling operational concerns. The company scaled confidently thanks to a highly automated and safe delivery method.

DevsData LLC is the partner that makes it happen when infrastructure stability, automation, and velocity matter. To get in touch, email general@devsdata.com
or visit the website at www.devsdata.com.

Conclusion

Hiring a DevOps engineer is more than just filling a technical gap—it’s about building a resilient, scalable, and efficient development ecosystem. Whether you’re deploying your first product, scaling to thousands of users, or trying to stop the “it worked on my machine” fire drills, a skilled DevOps professional can transform your operations.

At DevsData LLC, we’ve spent years refining a hiring approach that balances deep technical vetting with cultural fit and delivery speed. From setting up robust CI/CD pipelines to implementing Infrastructure as Code, our engineers have helped dozens of teams deploy faster, reduce downtime, and confidently scale.

Whether you need a dedicated full-time hire, a short-term expert for a high-impact project, or a fully managed DevOps team, we offer flexible engagement models tailored to your goals. Contact DevsData LLC at general@devsdata.com or visit www.devsdata.com. to discover how our proven hiring strategies can accelerate your delivery goals.

Discover how IT recruitment and staffing can address your talent needs. Explore trending regions like Poland, Portugal, Mexico, Brazil and more.

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Tsiala Jobava Copywriter and Marketer

Tsiala Jobava is a talented marketing specialist from Georgia. Tsiala holds a bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Georgian American University and a master’s in Marketing and Communication from Barcelona Business School. She has built a diverse career, working as a copywriter and in marketing and PR, before returning to her first passion – writing. Along the way, she has gained valuable experience in social media management, content creation, and brand development.


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