Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for DevOps Security Engineer

🎯 Role Definition

The DevOps Security Engineer is a cross-functional technical leader who designs, implements, and operationalizes security controls across cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, containers, and application delivery. This role blends deep security expertise with DevOps practices to automate threat detection, enforce compliance, drive secure-by-design engineering, and enable rapid, safe delivery. Key responsibilities include threat modeling, vulnerability management, infrastructure-as-code hardening, identity and access governance, and building developer-friendly security automation that scales across multiple teams and cloud environments.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior DevOps Engineer with security responsibilities
Cloud Security Engineer / Platform Engineer
Application Security Engineer or SRE with cloud experience

Advancement To:

Lead DevSecOps Engineer / Head of DevSecOps
Principal Cloud Security Engineer
Director of Security Engineering or VP of Security Operations

Lateral Moves:

Cloud Infrastructure Architect
Application Security Engineer (AppSec)
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Design, implement, and maintain automated security controls across CI/CD pipelines, ensuring build-time and deploy-time checks (SAST, SCA, DAST, dependency scanning) are integrated and provide actionable feedback to engineering teams.
Lead threat modeling for new and existing services and infrastructure, producing mitigations, secure design guidance, and risk-based recommendations that inform sprint and roadmap planning.
Develop, own, and harden infrastructure-as-code (IaC) templates (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM) and establish automated IaC scanning and policy-as-code (OPA/Gatekeeper, Sentinel) to prevent insecure configurations from being deployed.
Build and operate security automation and orchestration to auto-detect, triage, and remediate cloud misconfigurations, secrets exposure, and runtime threats across AWS/Azure/GCP environments.
Implement identity and access management (IAM) best practices including least privilege policies, role separation, automated key/secret rotation, and centralized authentication integration (SSO, SAML, OIDC).
Design and run container and Kubernetes security programs including image scanning, admission controllers, pod security policies, runtime threat detection (Falco, runtime EDR), and cluster hardening.
Develop and maintain security observability including logging, metrics, and alerting pipelines (ELK, Splunk, Datadog, Prometheus) to detect anomalies, audit changes, and support incident response.
Operate vulnerability management workflows by integrating scanning tools (Qualys, Nessus, Trivy, Anchore) with ticketing systems, prioritizing remediation, and tracking risk reduction metrics across teams.
Create and maintain secure build pipelines and artifact repositories (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Artifactory) with immutable artifacts, provenance, and supply chain protections.
Collaborate with product and engineering teams to embed security gates, quality checks, and developer-friendly remediation guidance that minimizes friction while raising the security baseline.
Drive secure release practices by building pre-deploy and post-deploy security validation (canary checks, AB tests, runtime policy enforcement) and participating in emergency change/incident reviews.
Automate detection and response playbooks for cloud incidents, including automated containment actions, evidence capture, and integration with SOAR/SIEM tooling to reduce mean time to detection and remediation.
Define and enforce security guardrails and policies for multi-account, multi-region cloud environments including network segmentation, encryption at rest/in transit, and secure default settings.
Lead continuous compliance programs by automating policy checks against standards (CIS Benchmarks, NIST, PCI, SOC2) and generating evidence for audits and compliance reporting.
Build and maintain secrets management and encryption services (HashiCorp Vault, AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault) with automated secret lifecycle and access control enforcement.
Conduct adversary-focused exercises such as purple team engagements, tabletop exercises, and simulated attacks to validate controls, improve detection, and train engineering teams.
Evaluate, pilot, and operationalize security tooling (SCA, SBOM generation, runtime protection, posture management) and provide procurement and roadmap input to platform teams.
Provide 24/7 on-call coverage for platform security incidents and collaborate with incident response, legal, and communications to coordinate containment and remediation.
Mentor and train engineering teams on secure coding, CI/CD security best practices, IaC hygiene, and secure cloud operations through workshops, playbooks, and internal documentation.
Maintain up-to-date knowledge of evolving cloud threats, new attack vectors (supply chain, container escape, misconfiguration), and create proactive defense strategies aligned with the threat landscape.
Author and maintain secure architecture patterns, runbooks, and developer guidance that balance speed of delivery with measurable security controls.
Partner with compliance and risk teams to quantify technical risk, support risk reviews, and translate control implementations into risk reduction and business outcomes.
Manage and optimize security costs by right-sizing tooling, automating remediation to reduce manual burden, and measuring ROI for security investments.

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.
Assist in preparing security metrics and executive reports that demonstrate program effectiveness and risk reduction over time.
Help maintain a knowledge base of incident post-mortems, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement actions.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Cloud security experience with at least one major provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP) including services, IAM, networking, and managed security services.
Expertise in infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM) and policy-as-code frameworks (OPA, Sentinel) for automated secure provisioning.
Strong experience building and securing CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI or equivalent, including pipeline security best practices.
Container and orchestration security skills with Kubernetes hardening, admission controllers, image scanning, and runtime threat detection.
Hands-on knowledge of vulnerability management and scanning tools (Qualys, Nessus, Tenable, Trivy, Snyk, Clair).
Experience with secrets management and key management systems such as HashiCorp Vault, AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault.
Proficiency with scripting and programming languages used for automation: Python, Go, Bash, or similar.
Familiarity with SAST/DAST tools and software composition analysis (Snyk, SonarQube, Veracode, OWASP ZAP), and integrating them into pipelines.
Strong logging, monitoring, and observability experience with SIEM and metrics platforms (Splunk, Datadog, ELK, Prometheus) for security telemetry and alerting.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) design and automation, including federated auth, role management, and least-privilege enforcement.
Experience implementing secure networking, segmentation, VPC design, and Web Application Firewall (WAF) configurations.
Knowledge of compliance frameworks and ability to automate evidence collection for SOC2, ISO27001, PCI DSS, or NIST.
Familiarity with container image provenance, SBOM generation and software supply chain security best practices.
Experience with incident response, forensics basics, and integration of detection playbooks into SOAR workflows.

Soft Skills

Excellent cross-functional communication skills to translate security concepts into engineering tasks and business risk.
Strong collaboration skills to work with product, engineering, compliance, and operations teams in a fast-paced environment.
Analytical problem-solving mindset with the ability to prioritize remediation efforts by risk and impact.
Pragmatic approach to security: able to balance controls with developer productivity and business objectives.
Coaching and mentoring aptitude to raise security knowledge across the engineering organization.
Project management and organizational skills to run security projects, pilots, and tool rollouts end-to-end.
Resilience under pressure and calm decision-making during security incidents and production emergencies.
Continuous learning mindset and ability to rapidly adopt new tools, cloud features, and security practices.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Security, Cybersecurity, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree in Cybersecurity, Computer Science, or related technical discipline; or advanced security certifications.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Information Security / Cybersecurity
Cloud Computing / Cloud Engineering
Software Engineering / Computer Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

3–8 years of combined DevOps, cloud, and security engineering experience; typical hires have 4–7 years.

Preferred:

5+ years building and securing cloud-native infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines, with demonstrable experience securing Kubernetes and multi-account cloud environments.
Relevant certifications such as CISSP, OSCP, CCSP, GCP Professional Cloud Security Engineer, AWS Certified Security – Specialty, or Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) are a strong plus.