Live job-market report DevOps & SRE Updated today

DevOps Engineer Skills — What Job Posts Actually Ask For (2026)

Aggregated from live DevOps, SRE and platform engineering postings rather than opinion. Every figure below is measured from real adverts and recalculated daily.

5,311 live DevOps Engineer postings read
Hiring companies 2,953
Added this week 1,007
Posted in last 24h 35

What a DevOps Engineer actually does

A devops engineer builds the machinery that gets other people's code into production and keeps it there — the pipelines that test and ship every change, the infrastructure those changes run on, and the monitoring that says whether any of it is working. The point of all that automation is that deploying should stop being an event. The other half of the job is what happens when something breaks: being on call, finding the cause under time pressure, and then making that failure impossible rather than merely fixed. This page covers devops, SRE and platform engineering together, because employers use the three titles for substantially overlapping work.

The skills DevOps Engineer postings actually ask for

Aggregated from the live descriptions of postings whose title names the role. Not a shortlist, and not anybody's opinion of what matters.

  • infrastructure 84.4%
  • security 71.6%
  • cicd 69.7%
  • automation 69.6%
  • python 66.8%
  • kubernetes 65.7%
  • terraform 62.8%
  • pipeline 62.8%
  • devops 61.6%
  • aws 60.1%
  • artificial intelligence 56.7%
  • monitoring 55.9%
  • infrastructure as code 55%
  • debugging 41%
  • azure 36.5%
  • docker 36.1%

Share of DevOps Engineer postings mentioning the skill — a posting asks for many, so these do not add to 100. Measured across postings whose title is the role.

How much experience, and where you would work

Minimum experience asked for

  • 0-2 years 447 8%
  • 3-5 years 2,474 47%
  • 6+ years 1,465 28%
  • Not stated 925 17%

Work policy

  • Remote 2,068 39%
  • Hybrid 1,185 22%
  • On-site 899 17%
  • Not specified 1,159 22%

178 of those 2,068 remote DevOps Engineer roles are open to candidates anywhere in the world — the rest are remote within one country only. Most job boards do not separate the two.

What separates a senior posting from a mid-level one

The same skill list, split by the seniority of the posting asking for it. Bars run right where senior postings ask more often, left where mid-level postings do.

  • mentoring +18.7 pt
  • distributed +10.8 pt
  • artificial intelligence +9.9 pt
  • strategy +8.1 pt
  • coaching +8.1 pt
  • version control -5.8 pt
  • shell -6.2 pt
  • problem solving -7.2 pt
  • docker -7.3 pt
  • devops -9.6 pt

Percentage-point gap between the senior+ and mid-level shares naming each skill. Senior+ includes principal, staff and executive.

The skills that are asked for rarely — and are worth more for it

Everyone asks for the top of that first chart, so naming it proves nothing. These sit far enough down to differentiate you, and close enough to the top to be worth the effort.

  • 14.9% eks of live postings
  • 14.9% java of live postings
  • 14.8% root cause analysis of live postings
  • 14.7% optimization of live postings
  • 14.3% continuous improvement of live postings
  • 13.6% datadog of live postings
  • 13% ai driven of live postings
  • 13% gitlab ci of live postings
  • 12.7% postgresql of live postings
  • 12.5% cloudformation of live postings

Who is hiring, and where those roles sit

Companies hiring for this role

  • 1 Mastercard 91
  • 2 Nvidia 78
  • 3 Salesforce 65
  • 4 Datadog 60
  • 5 Workday 42
  • 6 Synechron 39
  • 7 GitLab 36
  • 8 MongoDB 30

Where the roles we index sit

Where our listings sit, not the world's — the corpus skews to US and English-language boards.

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The tooling is more standardised than in any other role here

Compare the top of this chart with the equivalent on the backend or data pages and the difference is obvious: those roles spread across many valid choices, while this one converges hard on a small set of tools. Containers, orchestration, infrastructure as code, a pipeline runner and a cloud platform account for a large share of everything asked for.

That convergence cuts both ways. It makes the role unusually learnable — the list of things to know is short and public — and unusually competitive, because everyone applying has learned the same list. Which is what makes the rarer skills further down this page worth more here than almost anywhere else on the site.

A role that rewards operational evidence

The seniority split on this page is a useful read for anyone trying to move up. What separates senior postings is rarely another tool; it is the language of scale, reliability and designing systems other engineers depend on.

That is hard to demonstrate from a course and straightforward to demonstrate from having run something. If you have carried a pager for a system with real users, that is the experience these postings are actually asking about.

Common questions

Containers and orchestration, infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, at least one major cloud platform, and enough scripting to glue them together — plus monitoring and observability. The ranked list above gives the current share of postings naming each, recalculated daily.

The chart above shows the split, read as minimums. DevOps skews later than most technical roles: entry-level postings are a small share, largely because the work is about operating systems under failure and that is difficult to evidence without having done it.

It is one of the more natural moves, because the overlap in tooling is large and the pipeline and infrastructure work is already adjacent to what most engineers touch. The gap tends to be operational rather than technical — being responsible for what happens at 3am is a genuinely different job.

The work-policy chart above shows the actual split for these postings, along with the number open to candidates in any country rather than remote within one. On-call requirements sometimes come with time-zone expectations that a "remote" label does not capture, so the description is worth reading.

Less than the titles suggest, which is why this page covers them together. Broadly: devops describes the practice of shortening the path from code to production, SRE applies engineering discipline to keeping a specific system reliable, and platform engineering builds internal tooling for other engineering teams. Many postings use the terms interchangeably.

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