WHAT DOES A DEVOPS ENGINEER DO?
Published: Jun 18, 2025 - The DevOps Engineer develops, implements, and manages robust CI/CD pipelines to automate code integration, testing, and deployment processes across multiple environments. This role ensures infrastructure reliability and scalability through infrastructure-as-code practices, proactive system monitoring, and automated alerting for performance, security, and availability. The engineer also works closely with software developers, QA teams, and IT operations to align development and deployment workflows, reduce release cycles, and foster a culture of continuous improvement and operational excellence.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for DevOps Engineer
1. DevOps Engineer Responsibilities
- CI/CD Management: Design, automate, and support CI/CD stack, cloud infrastructure, monitoring, and logging.
- Pipeline Development: Work with developers and release management to design and implement delivery pipelines.
- Issue Troubleshooting: Troubleshoot production issues and coordinate with application development to streamline code deployment.
- Architecture Design: Participate in the design and implementation of infrastructure monitoring, security, and scaling solutions.
- Process Evaluation: Evaluate and evangelize forward-looking processes, tools, and technologies to deliver high-quality, secure software faster and more efficiently.
- Systems Testing: Conduct systems tests for security, performance, and availability.
- Documentation Maintenance: Develop and maintain design and troubleshooting documentation.
- Test Automation: Implement and improve automated testing solutions.
- Team Collaboration: Collaborate within the product team to consistently deliver quality software to end-users.
2. DevOps Engineer Job Summary
- Server Management: Responsible for designing, installing, testing, and maintaining a multi-platform server environment, including development, test, and production systems.
- Issue Resolution: Work with the software engineering team to troubleshoot and resolve issues in development, test, and production environments.
- Application Deployment: Perform application deployment in development, test, pre-production, and production servers.
- System Updates: Perform periodic updates on the server OS and its applications.
- Database Support: Perform MSSQL Server support, including log shipping, mirroring, backups, and MSSQL code deployment.
- Database Optimization: Maintain MSSQL database administration by optimizing databases.
- Performance Monitoring: Monitor various tools to identify and solve platform performance or stability issues.
- Technical Troubleshooting: Identify and solve technical issues that could disrupt operations.
- Documentation Management: Create and update internal technical documentation.
3. DevOps Engineer Accountabilities
- Software Integration: Design, develop, and implement software integrations based on user feedback.
- Process Improvement: Seek and identify the most onerous and cumbersome manual tasks in the organization and create plans to alleviate them.
- Automation Implementation: Implement automation tools and frameworks (CI/CD pipelines).
- Project Management: Drive projects, including creating deliverables and milestones.
- Team Collaboration: Collaborate with team members to improve engineering tools, systems, procedures, and data security.
- Documentation Maintenance: Develop and maintain design and troubleshooting documentation.
- Directory Management: Maintain Azure Active Directory and manage APIs.
- Application Improvement: Cooperate with developers to improve applications and establish best practices.
- Cloud Infrastructure: Help the platform team build, secure, and manage core cloud infrastructure, including Kubernetes clusters, databases, CI/CD systems, and software-defined networking.
- Internal Tools: Build internal tools to improve performance, quality, delivery, and observability.
- Incident Response: Participate in on-call rotations, troubleshoot performance and reliability issues, improve runbooks, and practice incident response.
- System Documentation: Improve documentation for mission-critical systems and processes.
4. DevOps Engineer Functions
- Splunk Support: Accountable for support and development work associated with the Enterprise Splunk platform (including application integration, data onboarding, configuration, dashboard design/development, analytics solutions involving machine learning, etc.).
- Stakeholder Collaboration: Work with stakeholders to translate new business requests into workable solutions through an iterative refinement process.
- Cross-team Integration: Work with Developers and Engineers across the business to integrate applications, troubleshoot issues, and test solutions.
- Security Support: Support Splunk Enterprise Security (SIEM) and keep systems up to date.
- Incident Remediation: Handle incident remediation and minor tasks for updates and changes.
- Subject Expertise: Provide specialist subject matter expertise and training to the wider business, championing best practices.
- DevOps Practices: Work predominantly using DevOps methods that embody the DevOps approach to delivery.
- Team Support: Manage everyday DevOps issues and support the development team in delivering work.
- Microservices Management: Create and maintain microservices in the cloud.
- Process Automation: Configure and automate processes related to building and maintaining programming environments (using Ansible and Docker).
- CI/CD Monitoring: Maintain and monitor Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment processes.
- Task Automation: Automate day-to-day tasks.
5. DevOps Engineer Job Description
- Cloud Management: Ensure Talend cloud management platform services run efficiently in production (SLA 99.9% - 99.95% SLO).
- Technical Operations: Maintain technical operations for Talend Cloud development/prototyping infrastructure.
- Issue Troubleshooting: Responsible for troubleshooting issues at the systems, network, and application stacks.
- Infrastructure Support: Accountable for troubleshooting Talend development and prototyping infrastructure, systems, network, and application stacks.
- Team Collaboration: Collaborate with team members to investigate and resolve technical or performance issues and perform root cause analysis.
- Scalability Improvements: Implement tactical and long-term product scalability, reliability, and maintainability improvements (architecture, code, script, or documentation related).
- Alert Development: Develop effective alerts and responses to identify and address reliability risks.
- Automated Testing: Implement automated testing solutions for non-functional requirements such as HA/DR testing, security, and performance.
- Architecture Participation: Participate in architecture and design discussions.
- Cloud Optimization: Define and evangelize cloud-related optimizations and best practices to improve reliability and performance.
- DevOps Culture: Push DevOps/SRE culture across the Research and Development organization and operations.
- On-Call Support: Provide support, including occasional on-call duty activities (during office hours), for Talend Cloud production infrastructure.
6. DevOps Engineer Overview
- Architecture Improvements: Suggest and perform architecture changes to improve DR, high availability, and security.
- Reliability Leadership: Lead site reliability and take actions to improve high availability.
- Cloud Deployment: Deploy and maintain development and production Kubernetes-based cloud environments, and improve existing deployment packages implemented with Helm.
- Monitoring Setup: Add visibility and monitoring infrastructure using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Logstash, etc.
- AWS Automation: Automate AWS resource provisioning with Terraform.
- Scalability Design: Build high scalability and availability to support global expansion.
- Cost Optimization: Monitor and suggest ways to reduce cloud costs.
- Build Automation: Execute build actions, automated Robot Framework integration tests, and Ansible playbooks for provisioning.
- Playbook Development: Build new Ansible playbooks from scratch and improve existing ones for the project.
- AI Support: Support a project developing AI/Machine Learning models in IBM Watson Studio.
7. DevOps Engineer Details and Accountabilities
- CI/CD Implementation: Put in place continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) processes and tools to enable the agile team to deliver quality software based on user feedback.
- Build Automation: Develop scripts to automate build, software release, application deployment, and system/application management.
- Team Collaboration: Collaborate with team members to improve engineering tools, systems, procedures, and data security.
- Documentation Management: Prepare and maintain technical documentation.
- Cloud Deployment: Apply cloud (AWS, Azure) and on-premise (VMWare) computing skills to deploy upgrades and fixes.
- Data Pipelines: Build data pipelines using Hadoop, Oozie, and Spark for feature engineering.
- Model Integration: Input data to models and make model scoring available to downstream consumers.
- Pipeline Development: In charge of building Research and Development (Development and QA) pipelines for creating artifacts and shipping them to production.
- Product Automation: Work with development and product teams to roll out new automation and features for customers.
- Architecture Design: Design and enhance software architecture to improve scalability, reliability, capacity, and performance.
- Monitoring Setup: Help influence and build company monitoring and logging solutions to be shipped as part of Kubernetes installations.
8. DevOps Engineer Additional Details
- CI/CD Development: Develop next-generation continuous integration, continuous delivery, auto-scaling, and resiliency capabilities.
- Monitoring Tools: Build proactive monitoring and alerting tools.
- Developer Coaching: Provide standards, documentation, and coaching to developers.
- Support Improvement: Improve and refine support systems to help developers build more robust applications.
- Config Management: Develop, test, and implement configuration management systems to fully automate infrastructure.
- Process Improvement: Continuously improve software delivery processes and tools.
- Cloud Management: Manage cloud deployment and configuration across production, staging, and dev/test environments.
- Cloud Buildout: Help build out the cloud environment.
- Automation Scripts: Develop scripts, metrics, and applications to automate and improve operational processes and availability, scaling, and security of the production environment.
- Issue Troubleshooting: Troubleshoot stability and performance issues.
- On-Call Support: Participate in one of the 24/7 on-call teams
9. DevOps Engineer Essential Functions
- Strategic Vision: Help define, through close collaboration with executive and interdisciplinary stakeholders, the long-term vision and strategy for the company's development processes, technology platform, and business scalability.
- Technical Analysis: Analyze, interpret, and make technical/architectural decisions based on data and statistics about product/system performance.
- Software Development: Assist in the architecture, engineering, development, and quality assurance of data-producing/consuming software, including changes to legacy web applications and DevOps processes.
- Cloud Management: Manage server images and optimize cloud resources and configurations.
- Code Review: Participate in code review processes and provide concrete, useful feedback to ensure code quality.
- Automation Coding: Write/modify code to achieve DevOps and architectural goals, focusing on automation scripts and increasing test coverage.
- Engineering Support: Assist engineers in enabling software development, machine learning, and Research and Development demos to operations staff, customers, and stakeholders.
- Effort Estimation: Support accuracy and precision of software development timelines and effort estimations through expert opinion and methodologies.
- Hiring Training: Contribute to hiring and training for engineering and product personnel, especially related to DevOps pipelines, infrastructure, and information security.
- Engineering Leadership: Provide informal engineering leadership, reinforcing code quality, information security, and agile product development standards/processes.
- Quality Management: Manage one or more quality control and manual/automated testing personnel.
- Security Officer: Serve as Information Security Officer for HIPAA and compliance purposes.
- Update Deployment: Deploy updates and fixes manually.
- Performance Monitoring: Develop systems for monitoring the performance of software and server systems.
- Root Cause: Perform root cause analysis for production errors and information security incidents.
- Procedure Design: Design and improve procedures for system troubleshooting and maintenance.
- Tier 3 Support: Provide Tier 3 technical support.
10. DevOps Engineer General Responsibilities
- Root Analysis: Responsible for performing root cause analysis for issues and incidents affecting system performance and availability, proactively identifying and resolving known errors to minimize incident re-occurrence.
- Vendor Evaluation: Assist in analyzing and evaluating vendor-supplied software and hardware products per the company's requirements and specifications.
- Requirements Translation: Help translate business and customer requirements into solid and stable solutions.
- Project Execution: Execute projects and tasks independently with limited supervision.
- Technical Planning: Provide technical input into planning and implementing complex upgrades, installations, and releases.
- Technology Updates: Keep abreast of IT updates, and recommend and evaluate products and services for group use.
- Process Improvement: Make recommendations to improve Group IT processes and operational support.
- CI/CD Automation: Bridge the development environment with production infrastructure by implementing automated CI/CD.
- Pipeline Design: Design the CI/CD chain and integrate its various steps.
- Stakeholder Collaboration: Collaborate with technical and non-technical stakeholders to identify needs and constraints (quality control, traceability, continuity).
- Process Design: Design processes, choose technologies to automate them, and implement/configure related products.
- Performance Monitoring: Maintain technology watch, monitor software factory and production environment performance, and propose improvements.
- Software Support: Support various software factory actors in diverse activities.