What a DevOps Engineer does
DevOps and SRE engineers keep production running and make shipping safe. In India the title covers everything from build-and-release engineering to full SRE with on-call ownership, so the JD needs to say which one you mean.
Hiring tip: State the on-call expectation and the cloud you run on. Those are the two things DevOps candidates ask about first, and leaving them out costs you the best applicants.
DevOps Engineer responsibilities
- Build and maintain cloud infrastructure as code
- Own CI/CD pipelines so engineers can ship safely several times a day
- Run and tune Kubernetes or container platforms in production
- Set up monitoring, alerting and on-call runbooks; lead incident response and post-mortems
- Keep infrastructure secure and cloud costs under control
For senior and lead roles, add:
- Define reliability targets (SLOs) and the platform roadmap with engineering leads
- Mentor engineers and lead large migrations, such as moving to Kubernetes or a new cloud
Skills to list
Must-have: AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, CI/CD, Linux.
Nice to have: GCP, Ansible, Python, GitHub Actions.
Swap in your real stack. Keep must-haves to what the hire will use every week; everything else belongs under nice-to-have.
Experience by seniority
| Title | Typical experience |
|---|---|
| Junior DevOps Engineer | 0–2 years |
| DevOps Engineer | 2–5 years |
| Senior DevOps Engineer | 5–8 years |
| Lead DevOps Engineer | 8+ years |
Setting the salary band? See current devops engineer salaries in India by experience and city.