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Cloud & platform

DevOps Engineer

On call for everything you did not personally break.

Typical pay

$95k-$180k

How you get in

Systems or development experience plus cloud certifications

Outlook

Strong

DevOps and platform engineers build the infrastructure and pipelines that get code into production and keep it running. It is not an entry-level role — it assumes you already know systems, networking or development.

A day in the life

  1. 8:30aCheck overnight alerts and pipeline failures
  2. 9:30aFix a broken deploy for another team
  3. 11:00aWrite Terraform for new infrastructure
  4. 1:00pCost review — why the cloud bill jumped
  5. 3:00pAutomate a manual process nobody wanted to own
  6. 5:00pHand off the on-call pager

How to get in

Sysadmin or network into DevOps

Duration

2-4 years

Cost

$500-$3,000 in certifications

Credential

AWS or Azure associate-level certification

  1. Work as a sysadmin, network admin or support engineer
  2. Learn Linux properly, then scripting in Python or Bash
  3. Get an AWS or Azure associate certification
  4. Automate something visible at work, then move into the platform team

Developer into platform

Duration

2-4 years

Cost

$0-$2,000

Credential

None — shipped infrastructure

  1. Work as a software developer first
  2. Take ownership of your team's CI/CD and deployments
  3. Learn containers, Kubernetes and infrastructure as code
  4. Move to a platform or DevOps team internally

Certification-led with a home lab

Duration

9-18 months

Cost

$1,000-$5,000

Credential

AWS/Azure certifications plus a public project portfolio

  1. Build real infrastructure in a personal cloud account
  2. Learn Terraform, Docker and Kubernetes hands on
  3. Publish the work publicly so it can be verified
  4. Expect to still enter through a support or junior ops role first

What people love

  • · Among the highest-paid roles outside management
  • · Remote-friendly
  • · Broad, genuinely interesting technical scope
  • · Skills transfer across every industry

What wears people down

  • · On-call rotations wake you up
  • · Blamed for outages regardless of cause
  • · Not entry level — requires a foundation first
  • · Tooling churn is relentless

From people doing it

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