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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for DevOps Support Engineer

💰 $ - $

🎯 Role Definition

The DevOps Support Engineer is a hands-on operations and platform-focused role responsible for supporting, stabilizing, automating, and improving production and pre-production infrastructure and delivery pipelines. This position blends technical support, platform engineering, incident response, and continuous improvement to ensure reliable CI/CD, scalable cloud infrastructure (AWS/Azure/GCP), container orchestration (Kubernetes), and observability (Prometheus, Grafana) for engineering teams. The DevOps Support Engineer functions as the escalation point for complex operational issues, contributes to runbooks and automation, and partners with development teams to deliver resilient, secure, and cost-efficient services.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Systems Administrator with exposure to cloud, containers, or monitoring
  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) or Cloud Support Engineer I
  • Build/Release Engineer or Platform Support Specialist

Advancement To:

  • Senior DevOps / Senior SRE
  • Platform Engineer / Infrastructure Engineer
  • Technical Lead, DevOps Manager, or Cloud Architect

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Operations Engineer
  • Release Manager / CI/CD Specialist
  • Security Operations Engineer (Cloud Security)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Serve as primary on-call or escalation support for production incidents affecting CI/CD pipelines, container platforms (Kubernetes), and cloud infrastructure, diagnosing root cause and coordinating remediation until full service restoration.
  • Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues across Linux-based systems, container runtimes (Docker, containerd), and Kubernetes clusters (EKS/GKE/AKS), including pod failures, scheduling issues, node autoscaling, and storage problems.
  • Maintain, operate, and improve CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or equivalent tools; design and implement pipeline templates and shared libraries to standardize releases and reduce lead time for changes.
  • Develop, maintain, and execute runbooks, playbooks, and run-time procedures for incident response, failover, disaster recovery, and routine maintenance to reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR).
  • Implement and manage Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, CloudFormation, or ARM templates to provision, version, and manage cloud resources reproducibly across environments.
  • Automate operational tasks and repetitive support workflows using scripting languages (Bash, Python, Go) and configuration management tools (Ansible, Chef, Puppet) to increase reliability and reduce manual toil.
  • Monitor systems, applications, and infrastructure with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic) and establish alerts, dashboards, and SLAs to detect and prevent service degradation.
  • Configure and maintain centralized logging and tracing solutions (ELK/EFK, Splunk, OpenTelemetry) to support troubleshooting, auditing, and performance investigation.
  • Manage access controls, secrets management, and identity integrations in cloud IAM, HashiCorp Vault, or cloud-native secrets services to ensure secure operations and least-privilege access.
  • Perform root cause analysis (RCA) for major incidents, produce post-incident reports, and implement preventive measures, automation fixes, or process changes to avoid recurrence.
  • Support application deployments and rollbacks, coordinate release windows with development and QA teams, and manage feature or canary rollouts for zero-downtime delivery.
  • Maintain platform capacity planning and cost optimization efforts for cloud resources (EC2/VM sizing, autoscaling strategies, storage tiering) to align performance and budget goals.
  • Apply infrastructure hardening, patch management, and vulnerability remediation processes in collaboration with security teams to maintain compliance and reduce attack surface.
  • Validate and test backups, snapshot, and disaster recovery procedures for critical systems and data, ensuring recoverability objectives are met.
  • Collaborate with product and engineering teams to onboard new services onto the platform, helping with architecture reviews, deployment strategies, and runbook creation.
  • Build and maintain CI/CD and platform documentation, internal knowledge-base articles, runbooks, and onboarding materials to reduce knowledge gaps and accelerate recovery.
  • Provide L2/L3 support for customer-facing issues and internal developer support tickets, triaging problems, reproducing bugs, and driving resolution through code, configuration, or infrastructure changes.
  • Implement blue/green, canary, and feature-flag deployment strategies to minimize user impact during releases and enable fast rollback when needed.
  • Monitor and improve service reliability metrics (availability, latency, error rates), collaborate on SLO/SLI definition and enforcement, and participate in reliability-focused retrospectives.
  • Integrate and maintain third-party services, APIs, and vendor-managed infrastructure while ensuring alignment to internal security and compliance policies.
  • Mentor junior engineers and support staff on operational best practices, troubleshooting techniques, and automation patterns to build a resilient support culture.
  • Lead or participate in technical change management, capacity reviews, and release coordination meetings with clear communication to stakeholders about risks and timelines.

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.
  • Maintain and improve developer self-service tooling, templates, and documentation to reduce time-to-first-deploy and increase developer productivity.
  • Conduct periodic operational readiness reviews and validate that new services meet operational requirements before production launch.
  • Support internal audits, compliance checks, and evidence collection for SOC, ISO, GDPR, or industry-specific certifications.
  • Proactively identify opportunities to reduce operational costs, consolidate services, or modernize legacy components.
  • Facilitate cross-functional postmortems and improvement initiatives to close action items and track reliability KPIs.
  • Run brown-bag training sessions and knowledge-sharing workshops on platform usage, observability best practices, and incident management.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Strong proficiency in Linux system administration (systemd, networking, storage, kernel troubleshooting) and comfort with command-line diagnostics.
  • Practical experience with Kubernetes (deployments, statefulsets, ingress controllers, service meshes) and container lifecycle management.
  • Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred, Azure or GCP) including compute, networking, and managed services (EKS/AKS/GKE, RDS, VPC, IAM).
  • Expertise with CI/CD tools and pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, CircleCI) and familiarity with release orchestration.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC) expertise: Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates, and modular, version-controlled infrastructure patterns.
  • Configuration management and automation using Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or SaltStack; ability to design idempotent automation playbooks.
  • Scripting and automation skills in Python, Bash, or Go for building tooling, automating runbooks, and integrating systems.
  • Observability and monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, and alerting strategies (PagerDuty, Opsgenie).
  • Logging and tracing: ELK/EFK stacks, Splunk, Fluentd/Fluent Bit, OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing and log aggregation.
  • Networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing, TLS, HTTP, VPC/subnet design, and troubleshooting network issues in cloud environments.
  • Security and secrets management: IAM best practices, Vault, KMS, and implementing least-privilege access models.
  • Backup, disaster recovery, and high availability design and testing for stateful workloads and databases.
  • Familiarity with database operations (RDS, PostgreSQL, MySQL) and performance tuning basics.
  • Version control and release workflows with Git, branching strategies, and pull request reviews.
  • Knowledge of compliance, governance, and change management processes relevant to enterprise operations.
  • Experience with cost management tools and tagging strategies for cloud resource optimization.

Soft Skills

  • Clear, concise communication for technical and non-technical stakeholders; ability to write effective runbooks and post-incident reports.
  • Strong troubleshooting and analytical thinking with methodical approaches to problem isolation and resolution.
  • Customer-focused mindset: prioritize user impact, service stability, and timely communication during incidents and maintenance.
  • Collaboration and teamwork: work cross-functionally with developers, product managers, security, and QA to deliver platform outcomes.
  • Time management and prioritization under pressure — effective handling of multiple incidents, change windows, and support tickets.
  • Mentorship and knowledge sharing to elevate team capabilities and promote best practices across the organization.
  • Adaptability to evolving technologies, shifting priorities, and fast-paced environments.
  • Ownership and accountability for operational metrics and continuous improvement initiatives.
  • Conflict resolution and negotiation skills to balance release velocity and operational risk.
  • Detail orientation for configuration management, documentation, and compliance evidence collection.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in computer-related fields, or relevant certifications (AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, AWS Certified SysOps Administrator, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate).

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 2–5 years in systems administration, cloud operations, SRE, DevOps, or platform support roles.

Preferred:

  • 3–6 years of hands-on experience supporting production cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and container platforms in a medium-to-large scale environment. Demonstrable experience in incident response, infrastructure automation (Terraform, Ansible), Kubernetes administration, and monitoring/observability tooling.
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