Top DevOps Highest Paying Jobs & Careers in 2020
What is DevOps?
For a long time in the IT industry, there was confusion as to whose job responsibility is to deploy any project. Mostly backend developers used to run builds and deploy them after development from both backend and front end is done, and quality assurance is finished. But the problem was that backend developers had the workload of their own, and they never had enough time to learn a new deployment strategy every time, or continuously keep checking deployments and then keep going back and forth with the operations team to get feedback.
This was a huge unsolved problem in the IT industry until late 2008 when DevOps came into being. Before DevOps, no one was assigned for maintaining pipelines and meeting the demands of clients, operations team and developers. A single position of DevOps engineer solved this issue. Now large companies cannot imagine workflow without DevOps in place. Since it’s become an industry-standard now, having DevOps is essential for fast-paced workflow.
Through DevOps different teams that are working in parallel on the same project come together for common problems. DevOps has shown ways to address these common problems through automation where necessary or collaboration where it is necessary. The best practices and strategies that come with DevOps help create an environment where automation is key and fast-paced workflow is a by-product.
Why DevOps?
Having proper DevOps in place has many advantages, among which the most prominent is that the overall development pace increased and continuous delivery comes in play. The DevOps engineer builds strategies to overcome development related issues that need to be communicated with the operations team as soon as they arise. The DevOps engineer focuses on such matters and designs pipelines in ongoing projects for continuous integration through which continuous delivery is also possible.
Upon having both CI/CD in place the next step for a DevOps engineer is to make a pipeline for the build and add test cases to them as well. These tests can be written by the developers themselves, the quality assurance team, or the DevOps engineers. Thes main focus here is that every time a new batch of code is pushed, a new build is made and then the defined test cases are run on that build if an only if all test cases pass then the build goes to the live or staging server and is made available / published.
Without a proper DevOps engineer, most of these tasks have to be done manually and separately by each expert of the domain. Hence it wouldn’t be wrong to say that DevOps actually bridges the gap between different teams of an organization while also at the same time minimizing their workload. DevOps has become an essential part of the development process and is here to stay.
Top 5 highest paying jobs in DevOps
DevOps Engineer
A DevOps engineer is a person who has completed some level of DevOps certification or is currently employed at some IT company to automate development processes. This includes continuous integration and continuous deployment. One DevOps engineer can carry out all these various tasks but depending on the company size and its requirements companies usually offer more titles to DevOps engineers.
Average Salary: The average salary of a DevOps engineer is $120,000
Continuous Delivery Engineer
This is a sub-level position of DevOps engineer. The continuous delivery engineer setups the processes involved in continuous deployment. A CD engineer builds up the structure through with each build is delivered either to the client or uploaded to the server. Note that this delivery is not the final release rather one of many releases that are uploaded to the server for testing purposes.
Average Salary: The average salary of a CD engineer is around $80,000
Security Engineer
Security plays a vital role in the DevOps strategy. A security engineer in the DevOps environment oversees any potential security leaks in the system, and implement precautionary measure to assure most security-related issues are handled before any actual exploit happens.
Average Salary: The average salary of a security engineer is $106,000
Release Manager
This job position controls and audits each release that is made public. Proper release versioning and documentation are set in an automated manner by the release manager. Experienced release managers have overseen hundreds of releases on different platforms, hence they know a thing or two about release control.
Average Salary: The average salary of a release manager is $96,000
Infrastructure Automation Engineer
As the name suggests this position carries out the implementation of automation in a DevOps environment. An Infrastructure Automation Engineer designs and builds the infrastructure of a DevOps project in such a way that automation is catered at every single step and manual labor is minimized in as many processes as possible. Infrastructure automation engineers can also serve the role of quality assurance engineers by setting up an automated testing pipeline within the DevOps strategy and then either by writing their own test cases or asking developers to tests along with each new build.
Average Salary: An Infrastructure Automation Engineer earns around $90,000
How to Land The Best DevOps Jobs in 2020
There is no direct answer as to how to land any job with a hundred percent confidence. As every interviewer is different, so is every applicant. The most essential thing in any IT job interview is to be confident about your skills. When asked questions that you don’t know answers to, it is better to admit that you don’t know but also present something relatable that you do know.
When it comes to DevOps, this is one field where you should know your capabilities. As selection for any job or project depends on your DevOps experience, knowledge and certifications if you have any.
Landing that first job is difficult for most people, because of a lack of experience. But what most people don’t realize is that lack of experience can be overshadowed by a surplus of skill. During the interview period, many experts tend to observe the personality to the applicant, whether they can adapt new skills and fit in a new environment or not.