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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for DevOps Analyst

💰 $75,000 - $140,000

DevOpsCloudSite ReliabilityInfrastructureEngineering

🎯 Role Definition

A DevOps Analyst is responsible for designing, implementing, and operating automated, resilient, and secure delivery pipelines and cloud-native infrastructure. This role bridges development and operations by building scalable CI/CD pipelines, managing cloud and container platforms, applying Infrastructure as Code (IaC), instrumenting monitoring and observability, and driving automation to accelerate software delivery while ensuring reliability, security, and cost-efficiency. Ideal candidates combine strong Linux and cloud experience with scripting, configuration management, pipeline creation, and proactive incident response.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Systems Administrator or Linux Administrator with scripting experience
  • Software Engineer / Backend Engineer interested in automation and platform tooling
  • QA Automation Engineer moving into pipeline and environment automation

Advancement To:

  • Senior DevOps Engineer / Lead DevOps Engineer
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Cloud Architect or Platform Engineer
  • DevOps Manager / Engineering Manager

Lateral Moves:

  • Platform Engineer
  • Release Manager / Build & Release Engineer
  • Cloud Operations Specialist
  • Security Engineer (DevSecOps)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, build and maintain scalable CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or CircleCI to automate build, test, and deployment processes across multiple environments.
  • Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi or ARM templates to provision, manage, and version cloud infrastructure in AWS, Azure or GCP environments while ensuring repeatability and compliance.
  • Containerize applications and manage container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS) and Docker, including authoring Helm charts, managing namespaces, deployments, StatefulSets, and services for production workloads.
  • Automate routine operations and runbooks via scripting (Python, Bash, PowerShell) and configuration management tools such as Ansible, Chef, or Puppet to reduce manual toil and accelerate incident remediation.
  • Configure and manage cloud services (compute, storage, networking, IAM) across AWS, Azure or GCP, including VPCs, subnets, security groups, load balancers, and managed database services to meet performance and security requirements.
  • Design and implement secrets management and secure configuration practices using tools like HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or Azure Key Vault to protect sensitive data and credentials.
  • Build robust monitoring and observability stacks using Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK/EFK, or CloudWatch; implement metrics, logs, traces and alerts to proactively detect and resolve performance or reliability issues.
  • Lead incident response and root cause analysis (RCA) for production incidents, including postmortems, identifying mitigations, and implementing preventative automation to reduce recurrence.
  • Implement deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, rolling updates) and feature toggles to enable safe releases, minimize downtime, and support continuous delivery practices.
  • Collaborate closely with development, QA, security, and product teams to define deployment requirements, environment parity, and release windows while promoting DevOps best practices across the organization.
  • Evaluate, recommend and onboard new tools or cloud services that improve developer productivity, reduce costs, and increase system reliability; maintain a roadmap of tooling improvements and technical debt reduction.
  • Configure and enforce CI/CD security gates, SAST/DAST integrations, container scanning, and policy enforcement (OPA/Gatekeeper) to secure the software delivery pipeline and ensure regulatory compliance.
  • Optimize cloud costs by rightsizing instances, implementing autoscaling and reserved/spot instance strategies, and creating cost reporting and alerting processes to monitor spend and forecast budgets.
  • Manage and maintain backup, disaster recovery and high-availability strategies for critical systems, including automated backups, multi-region failover, and recovery verification tests.
  • Maintain and administer source code repositories and branching strategies (Git workflows), ensuring consistent tagging, release management, and merge policies to support reproducible builds.
  • Implement network, application and host-level security hardening and compliance checks, working with security teams to remediate vulnerabilities and enforce least privilege for services and accounts.
  • Develop and maintain comprehensive runbooks, onboarding guides, and environment documentation to reduce ramp-up time for new engineers and improve operational consistency.
  • Build automated testing integration in CI pipelines (unit, integration, smoke, and performance tests) to catch regressions earlier and ensure quality before deployment.
  • Support platform observability by creating dashboards, synthetic checks, SLOs/SLIs and alerting runbooks that align with business-level objectives and SLAs.
  • Participate in capacity planning and performance tuning across compute, storage, and network layers to meet evolving application demands and SLAs.
  • Maintain cross-environment consistency and manage environment lifecycle (dev/stage/prod) including configuration drift prevention, environment provisioning and teardown automation.
  • Enforce and champion GitOps practices where feasible, enabling declarative infrastructure and deployments driven directly from version-controlled manifests.
  • Provide 24/7 on-call support rotation for critical production services, triaging alerts, coordinating incident communication, and driving rapid resolution.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Mentor junior engineers on DevOps tools, pipeline design, and platform best practices.
  • Run periodic security and configuration audits and work with compliance teams to meet audit requirements.
  • Assist in vendor evaluation and manage third-party tool integrations and subscriptions.
  • Develop automation to provision and maintain ephemeral development and test environments to accelerate developer feedback loops.
  • Coordinate release communications and change management processes with stakeholders and platform consumers.
  • Provide guidance for disaster recovery drills and execute tabletop exercises to validate recovery runbooks.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud platforms: AWS (EC2, S3, RDS, IAM, CloudWatch), Azure (VMs, Storage, Azure AD), or Google Cloud Platform fundamentals.
  • Containerization & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS), Helm chart authoring, cluster lifecycle management.
  • CI/CD: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or equivalent build and pipeline orchestration tools.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi — experience creating modular, versioned infrastructure modules.
  • Configuration Management & Automation: Ansible, Chef, Puppet, SaltStack for automated configuration and provisioning.
  • Scripting & Programming: Python, Bash, PowerShell for automation, tooling, and integration tasks.
  • Monitoring & Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, New Relic, Splunk — metrics, logging, tracing implementation.
  • Version Control & Git workflows: Git branching strategies, pull request reviews, merge/release processes.
  • Security & Compliance tooling: vulnerability scanning, container scanning (Trivy, Clair), secrets management (Vault), IAM best practices.
  • Networking & Linux: strong Linux administration, networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, load balancing, DNS, VPN) and troubleshooting.
  • Release Strategies: blue/green, canary deployments, feature flags, and automated rollback mechanisms.
  • Database & Storage familiarity: managed relational and NoSQL services and backup/restore procedures.
  • Observability SLOs/SLIs and incident management tooling (PagerDuty, Opsgenie).
  • Cloud cost optimization tools and practices (cost allocation, tagging, reserved instances, auto-scaling).
  • Policy-as-code & governance: OPA/Gatekeeper, Terraform Sentinel, or cloud-native policy enforcement.

Soft Skills

  • Strong collaboration and stakeholder management — communicates clearly with developers, product managers, and security teams.
  • Analytical problem-solving with attention to detail under pressure during incidents.
  • Proactive ownership mentality—drives initiatives, documents outcomes, and reduces future risk.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning mindset to evaluate and adopt new DevOps tools and practices.
  • Good time management and prioritization across competing operational and project work.
  • Coaching and mentoring capabilities to uplift junior engineers and cross-functional teams.
  • Clear technical writing skills for runbooks, architecture diagrams and onboarding documentation.
  • Customer-focused mindset — balances developer productivity with reliability and security needs.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or related technical field; or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Computer Science, Cloud Computing, or IT Management (preferred but not required).
  • Relevant professional certifications (AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Azure DevOps Engineer, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Systems / IT
  • Software Engineering
  • Cloud Computing / Cloud Engineering
  • Network Engineering / Cybersecurity

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 2–6 years in systems engineering, site reliability, cloud operations, or DevOps roles.

Preferred: 3–8 years with hands-on experience building and operating CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration (Kubernetes), IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation), and at least one major cloud provider (AWS/Azure/GCP). Prior experience in automated monitoring, incident management, and security/compliance initiatives is strongly preferred.

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