How do you hire a DevOps engineer for a technology company?

In short

Hire a DevOps engineer who can plan how a system is installed and changed, set the performance standards it must meet, and adapt software when the platform underneath it changes. O*NET lists DevOps Engineer as a reported title under Software Developers, and those duties sit in its core tasks beside system design and directing testing.

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What does a DevOps engineer do day to day at a technology company?

A DevOps engineer at a technology company keeps software moving from development into production and keeps it running there. O*NET has no separate DevOps occupation; it files DevOps Engineer (Development Operations Engineer) under Software Developers (O*NET 15-1252.00). The core tasks closest to DevOps work are:

  • Analyze information to determine, recommend, and plan installation of a new system or modification of an existing system.
  • Determine system performance standards.
  • Modify existing software to correct errors, adapt it to new hardware, or upgrade interfaces and improve performance.
  • Develop or direct software system testing or validation procedures, programming, or documentation.
  • Confer with systems analysts, engineers, programmers and others to design systems and to obtain information on project limitations and capabilities, performance requirements and interfaces.

Which skills should a DevOps engineer job description ask for?

A DevOps engineer job description should ask for systems the candidate installed, changed and held to a performance standard, and for the incidents that changed how they work.

O*NET's technology list for Software Developers covers every kind of developer, from Adobe Photoshop to Amazon DynamoDB, so it does not narrow a DevOps search. Name the cloud, deployment and monitoring tools your team runs instead.

  • Planned and carried out a system installation or migration, including the rollback plan
  • Set a performance standard for a service and measured against it
  • Built or ran the testing and validation steps a release passed through
  • Wrote the runbook or documentation other engineers used during an incident

Which titles do DevOps engineer candidates use?

DevOps engineer candidates do not always use the DevOps title. The titles O*NET reports for Software Developers include:

  • DevOps Engineer (Development Operations Engineer)
  • Infrastructure Engineer
  • Systems Engineer
  • Application Integration Engineer
  • Software Development Engineer

How much of a DevOps engineer's work do people bring to AI tools?

0.35% of sampled Claude.ai conversations in May 2026 were about the tasks of Software Developers, the O*NET occupation that lists DevOps Engineer, according to the Anthropic Economic Index. In those conversations, 60.79% asked Claude to complete the task directly (automation) and 39.21% worked with it iteratively (augmentation).

Software Developers is one of the occupations where automation outweighed augmentation in that sample. For hiring, ask how the candidate reviews a script or configuration change an assistant wrote before it touches production. The figures describe how people used Claude, not how many DevOps jobs exist.

Common questions

Does O*NET have a DevOps occupation?
O*NET has no separate DevOps occupation. DevOps Engineer (Development Operations Engineer) appears as a reported title under Software Developers (O*NET 15-1252.00).
Should a DevOps engineer job post ask for every cloud tool?
A DevOps job post should name the tools your team actually runs and test the habits behind them: planned changes, performance standards and tested releases. A long tool list screens out people who could learn your stack.

Where this data comes from

  • O*NET 31.0 DatabaseThis page includes information from the O*NET 31.0 Database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA), used under the CC BY 4.0 license. O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA. EmployLabs has modified all or some of this information. USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed, or tested these modifications.
  • Anthropic Economic Index, release_2026_06_26 (claude_ai, global, soc_occupation, May 2026)Anthropic Economic Index (Anthropic), data released under CC BY. Usage share is the share of sampled Claude.ai conversations classified to this occupation; the automation/augmentation split describes how those conversations used Claude. Neither measures the labour market.

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