A Guide to Hiring DevOps Engineers – Everything You Need to Know

Having a DevOps engineer on the team means faster and more efficient deliveries, fusing the gap between development and operations, and leaving room for creativity and pre-solving potential hindrances. No wonder DevOps engineers are high in demand.

But hiring DevOps engineers is difficult, keeping in mind that DevOps engineers are expensive and hard to find. Not many universities are offering the necessary training for DevOps or deep Linux administration, creating a gap in the demand and supply of DevOps engineers.

There is no right answer to ‘how to hire the best DevOps engineer?’ but we have worked out a tried and tested guideline for hiring DevOps engineers and sharing it with you.

If you are looking for a DevOps engineer or want to understand what is DevOps, this guide is for you.

TABLE OF CONTENT

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a fusion of development and operation, hence called Dev-Ops. Product development processes are divided into different tasks and phases, all of which either fall under development or operations. DevOps engineers master the art of both development and operations, hence a bright future of DevOps is guaranteed.

But to truly understand the scope of a DevOps engineer, let’s talk about development and operations. The development part covers the UI/UX and coding for the product and then the operations team takes over for testing and deployment.

This means going back and forth for development and testing, and back to the development for bug fixing and other issues. And this delays the process. But hiring DevOps engineers can reduce the lead time by handling development and operations simultaneously.

This process of handling development and operations in the chorus is often referred to as the DevOps infinity pool.

Why Hire a DevOps Engineer?

But, do you really need to hire a DevOps engineer for your company? Let’s talk about some of the key advantages of hiring DevOps engineers to help you decide.

With a proficient DevOps team on board, your product development cycle will be more aligned with less chaos of testing, bug fixing, adding new features, and so on. The production quality will significantly improve with continuous feedback, allowing you to improve user experience.

Product deliveries speed up and resources are better optimized with better communication and collaboration. You save time and money and the overall IT infrastructure of your company will also improve. With DevOps, 60% less time is spent on handling support-related issues.

So, if you are a tech development company, hiring a DevOps engineer is almost a must-have for you.

• The DevOps engineer will ensure timely security audits, and high-end security controls like Linux/Unix, SSH keys, AWS accounts, and more.
• Your DevOps engineer will be responsible for designing and maintaining continuous integration and delivery in CircleCI, Gitlab, AWS CodePipeline, or Jenkins.
• The DevOps engineer will help decrease the deployment time considerably, ensuring faster deliveries.
• With a DevOps engineer on board, you will have automated scripting of your serves, infrastructure, cronjobs, and other processes.
• DevOps engineers are well-versed in interconnecting different VPC networks, deploying VPN services, troubleshooting networking issues, and more.
• DevOps engineers help troubleshoot web applications, maintain and administer databases, create micro services architectures for SaaS applications, and more.

In a nutshell, if you hire a DevOps engineer, you will have a cloud engineer, a Linux administrator, and a site reliability engineer.

These are some of the many must-have skills that you cannot compromise on if you want to hire a DevOps engineer that truly adds value to your company.

However, a couple of advanced skills are also essential.

Advanced Skills Required for a DevOps Engineer

Hiring an expert DevOps engineer requires the candidate of some of the following:

• Expertise in DevOps practice landscape.
• Understanding of applying a 12-factor methodology
• Hands-on experience on Azure EKS, Google Kubernetes Service, Kubernetes Standalone, and more.
• Experience with HIPAA, SOC2, or PCI
• Knowledge of IaC knowledge and Terraform best practices
• Ability to design and implement serverless apps such as Lambda and Amazon
• Ability to create native cloud architectures
• And more

Soft Skills Required for a DevOps Engineer

A DevOps engineer works with different teams, each with diverse roles. And that’s why it is important to look for various soft skills when hiring a DevOps engineer.

Communication is one of the most important soft skills for a DevOps engineer. Working with different teams and handling the dev-ops fiasco requires excellent communication skills. A DevOps engineer must be able to effectively communicate with people having different levels of skills and understand the project and resource requirements. Also, having a grip on online communication tools JIRA, Slack, and Zoom is important.

Teamwork skills are also crucial for a DevOps engineer. Collaboration is not possible with teamwork and fostering an environment of trust and cooperation will be the responsibility of a DevOps engineer. 

• Knowledge and experience in networking and Linux servers
• Some DevOps certifications such as Terraform Certification, Kubernetes Certification, AWS Certification, or Docker Certification
• Experience in managing different AWS services such as Amazon S3, VPC, ECS, EC2, and others
• Interest in IaC tools, Python, Bash, and others
• Excellent communication and problem-solving skills

And if the resume does not include more than one of these, know that this one is not your ideal DevOps engineer. We told you that hiring a DevOps engineer is not easy.

• What is the process you usually follow to identify the cause of frequent server crashes?
• In your own words, please explain to us the differences between CI and CD, assuming that we know nothing about it.
• What is the process for interconnecting two VCPs?
• Tell us a few ways to save costs in Amazon S3 Buckets?
• What is the process for troubleshooting a MySQL Database?
• What are the differences and similarities between DevOps and Agile?
• Do you believe that Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment overlap?
• Tells us about some DevOps tools that you struggle with.
• How does Ingress work?

And once you are done with the technical skills, ask some other questions too to understand the candidate’s career plans and work culture.

• As a DevOps engineer joining our company, how would you change the overall product development cycle?
• Tell us three problems you will be focusing on, considering that we might not have any DevOps architecture in the company.
• How long do you think will the team need to adapt to a DevOps-integrated change?
• How do you think your problem-solving skills will help us?
• Tell us about some of the common challenges you encounter in a DevOps ecosystem?

These questions should help you decide between the candidates you interview for the role of a DevOps engineer.

Staff Augmentation

In case of urgent work, staff augmentation will help you fill the position for some time for specific skills. DevOps engineers hired via staff augmentation will be employees of your organization as people are coming in to join the company, even though it is for a short period.

This is where staff augmentation differs from outsourcing.

Outsourcing

Outsourcing DevOps engineers is one of the best choices. In case cloud software architecture isn’t your main business, outsourcing DevOps engineers is a good choice.

You get immediate and uninterrupted access to some of the top DevOps engineers. You get the flexibility to work with some of the best DevOps engineers from across the globe. You can hire different DevOps engineers for different projects.

Let’s talk about why offshore DevOps engineers will do the job for you.

Saves Time & Money

Having full-time employees comes with a couple of challenges. For starters, you have a lot of perks to offer full-time employees which add to the expenses, especially for a senior position like that of a DevOps engineer.

If you are a startup, you might not want to add more full-time employees, especially high-paying ones.

That’s when project-based offshore hiring of DevOps engineers becomes your best bet. Hiring full-time DevOps engineers will be expensive and time-consuming.

You can save yourself the hassle (and money) by working with a reliable hiring agency for DevOps engineers.

Offers Higher Flexibility

Hiring project-based DevOps engineers, that too offshore, will give you the flexibility of picking and choosing resources for each project. On the contrary, keeping full-time employees means you have to utilize the available resources who might not always be a perfect match.

If you want to test the potential of DevOps in your company before you fully adopt it, project-based hiring is the way to go.

Removes Geographical Limitations

This is one of the most crucial benefits of offshore hiring. You can work with anyone from across the globe, so you don’t have to settle for DevOps engineers available in your city. And with a resource shortage for DevOps engineers, you cannot insist on an in-house DevOps engineer.

If you are headquartered in a place that does not have A* DevOps engineers, going offshore will ensure that you don’t have to compromise on project quality and delivery.

Here is an average per-hour cost for hiring DevOps engineers:

Let’s get in touch to discuss your plans of hiring DevOps engineers for your next project. We’d walk you through the process and get you an expert DevOps engineer in less than 5 days!