DevOps Engineer Job Description
A complete DevOps engineer job description template, plus the ATS keywords recruiters screen for and how the role actually differs from SRE.
DevOps Engineer is one of the least standardized titles in software, and the confusion is not accidental — the word originally named a philosophy (developers and operations collaborating instead of throwing releases over a wall), not a job. Companies backfilled a job title onto that philosophy at different speeds and with different scopes, so the same three words can mean "the one person who keeps AWS and the CI pipeline running" at a twenty-person startup, or a specialized platform engineering role embedded in a hundred-person infrastructure org at a larger company.
The DevOps-versus-SRE question is genuinely unsettled, not a matter of one side being confused. Site Reliability Engineering, as Google originally defined it, is a specific discipline built around error budgets and treating operations as a software engineering problem; DevOps is broader and less formally defined, closer to a set of practices around continuous integration, deployment automation, and shortening the path from commit to production. In practice, most companies outside a handful with a genuine SRE culture use the two titles almost interchangeably, and which one a given posting uses often just reflects which term the hiring manager encountered most recently.
Read the responsibilities section, not the title, to figure out which job this actually is. A posting heavy on pipeline design, deployment tooling, and internal developer experience is closer to the DevOps center of gravity; one heavy on incident response, on-call, and production ownership is closer to SRE regardless of what it's called. The requirements list is the other tell: a language requirement (Python, Go) signals real engineering expectations, while a posting that only lists tool names without a coding requirement is often closer to systems administration wearing a newer title.
Verrantine · Remote (US)
Full-time · Remote
$140,000 – $185,000
About the role
Verrantine is hiring a Senior DevOps Engineer to join the Cloud Infrastructure team, which owns the deployment pipeline, cloud environment, and the tooling every other engineering team builds and ships through. You'll spend your time about evenly between pipeline and platform work — CI/CD, infrastructure as code, container orchestration — and the scripting and light development work needed to make that platform pleasant for the seventy engineers who depend on it daily.
This is a remote, US-based role on a small team with a lot of ownership. We are past the stage of hand-running deployments, but there is still plenty of infrastructure that was built fast during our growth years and now needs to be rebuilt properly. You should enjoy that kind of work rather than treat it as cleanup before the real job starts.
What you'll do
- Design, build and maintain CI/CD pipelines that engineering teams use to ship several times a day.
- Own the infrastructure-as-code that provisions and configures our AWS environment, primarily in Terraform.
- Operate and improve our Kubernetes clusters, including upgrades, scaling policies and cost tuning.
- Build internal tooling that makes it easier for other engineers to deploy, roll back and debug their own services.
- Participate in an on-call rotation for platform-level incidents, roughly one week in five.
- Write runbooks and post-incident reviews that the next engineer on call can actually use.
- Partner with engineering teams early in design so infrastructure needs are planned for, not retrofitted.
- Evaluate and roll out new tooling — from secrets management to observability — with a clear rollback plan.
What we're looking for
- Five or more years in a DevOps, platform, or infrastructure engineering role.
- Production experience with Kubernetes and Docker at a scale beyond a single side project.
- Working proficiency in at least one programming language — Python or Go — beyond shell scripting.
- Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code, ideally Terraform, including modules other teams reuse.
- Solid Linux systems fundamentals: networking, storage, process management, and how to debug all three under pressure.
- Experience with a major cloud provider's IAM, networking and security model, not just its compute services.
- Comfort being the person paged at 2 a.m., and the judgment to know when it can wait until morning.
Nice to have
- Experience with GitOps workflows (ArgoCD, Flux) rather than manually applied changes.
- Familiarity with observability stacks — Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog or similar.
- A cloud provider certification (AWS, Azure or GCP) at the associate level or higher.
- Experience running a secrets-management system such as Vault, including key rotation.
- Prior experience supporting a team through a cloud migration or a major platform rebuild.
Benefits
- Medical, dental and vision coverage, with employee premiums covered in full.
- 401(k) with a 4% company match, vested immediately.
- Fully remote within the US, with a home-office stipend and twice-yearly team offsites.
- $2,000 annual learning budget, usable on conferences, courses or certifications.
- Twenty days of paid time off plus company holidays.
Salary range
As posted for this sample role. Real pay varies by employer, location and experience.
$140,000–$185,000/ yr
ATS keywords for this role
The applicant tracking system (ATS) — the recruiting software a hiring team searches and filters applicants with — will screen for these. Weight shows how central each one is to this specific posting.
Required and central (6)
Important (7)
Mentioned in passing (6)
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between a DevOps Engineer and a Site Reliability Engineer?
Less than the job titles suggest. Site Reliability Engineering, as originally defined at Google, is a specific discipline built around error budgets and treating operations as software engineering; DevOps is a broader, less formally defined set of practices around CI/CD and deployment automation. Outside companies with a genuine SRE culture, most teams use the two titles interchangeably — read the responsibilities section to see which job it actually is.
Do I need a computer science degree to become a DevOps Engineer?
No — this is one of the more degree-agnostic paths in tech. A large share of DevOps engineers move in from systems administration or a related IT role, where hands-on infrastructure experience carries more weight than a degree. A cloud certification is a more common substitute than a CS degree is a requirement.
Is DevOps Engineer just a rebranded sysadmin title?
Sometimes, and it's worth checking which one you're looking at. If a posting lists tools but no programming language, expects you to run existing infrastructure rather than build it, and the on-call load is the whole job description, that is systems administration with a newer title. A posting that expects you to write the automation, not just operate someone else's, is doing different work regardless of what it's called.
What certifications actually matter for a DevOps role?
A cloud provider certification (AWS, Azure or GCP) helps most for candidates without much on-the-job cloud experience to point to yet — it signals baseline knowledge to a recruiter doing a first pass. For experienced hires, a track record of infrastructure you've actually built and kept running carries far more weight than another certification.
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