DEDevOps Engineer
DE
Career

DevOps Engineer

By the numbers
Typical pay
$135,980 / yr
Education to start
Bachelor's degree
Future demand
+15.8% by 2034
People in this job
1.7M
Figures shown for ·closest of 3 O*NET occupations
The work
A day, hour by hour
08:45
Alerts & overnight review

Scan monitoring dashboards; decide which overnight alerts are noise vs. real.

09:15
Standup & triage

Sync with dev and ops teams; surface blocked deploys and burning incidents.

09:40
Pipeline fix

Hunt down a broken CI build; patch the config and re-trigger the run.

11:00
Infrastructure scripting

Write Terraform code to spin up a new staging environment automatically.

13:30
Dev pairing session

Sit with a developer to figure out why the app crashes in staging but not locally.

14:30
Deploy decision

Traffic is still high — push the hotfix now or wait two hours? Wait wins.

15:00
Security & pipeline hardening

Bake a vulnerability scanner into the build so bad dependencies never ship.

16:30
Dashboard tuning

Tighten alert thresholds on Grafana; kill three alerts that fire every day for nothing.

17:15
Handoff & on-call prep

Document open incidents and arm the on-call runbook before signing off.

Things you do
  • Build pipelines that automatically test and ship code to users.
  • Write scripts to spin up servers and cloud infrastructure automatically.
  • Get paged at 2 a.m. when a production system crashes and fix it fast.
  • Package apps into containers so they run the same everywhere.
  • Set up dashboards that watch for slowdowns or errors in real time.
Decisions you’ll make
  • Should I deploy this fix now, or wait until traffic is lower?
  • Is this alert a real emergency, or just noise I can tune out?
  • Should I automate this process, or is it too one-off to bother?
  • Do I roll back the broken release, or push a fast-forward fix?
  • Is our infrastructure stable enough to adopt this new tool right now?
Education Pathways · how you get there
95 in 100 went the college route · 5 in 100 found another way in None, typically
Education mapped from O*NET:
If you like this, also look at