Hiring guide
How to Hire a DevOps Engineer
DevOps is one of the easiest roles to get wrong. The title is used loosely, the skill set overlaps with several other engineering disciplines, and a CV full of tool names tells you almost nothing about whether someone can keep a production system running at 3am. This guide sets out how to hire a DevOps engineer by screening for real platform and reliability experience, not keyword matches.
Start by defining what “DevOps” means for your team
Before writing a job description, decide what the person will actually do day to day. In practice, “DevOps engineer” covers several distinct jobs:
- Platform engineering: building internal tooling, CI/CD pipelines and self-service infrastructure for other engineers.
- Site Reliability Engineering (SRE): owning uptime, latency and incident response, usually with formal error budgets and on-call rotas.
- Infrastructure/cloud engineering: designing and provisioning cloud environments, often with a strong security and cost angle.
- Release and automation engineering: focused on deployment pipelines, testing gates and environment management.
A candidate who is excellent at one of these can be mediocre at another. Get clear internally on which of these you are actually hiring for, because that decision shapes the entire screen.
DevOps vs SRE: does the distinction matter for hiring?
In theory, SRE is a more prescriptive discipline than DevOps, with practices like service level objectives, error budgets and blameless postmortems. In practice, UK employers use the two titles almost interchangeably, and candidates move freely between them.
What matters for hiring is not the label but the evidence behind it. Ask every candidate, regardless of title, to describe:
- A production incident they were directly involved in resolving, and what changed afterwards.
- How they measure reliability today (if they cannot name a metric, they are unlikely to have owned it).
- Where they draw the line between their responsibilities and a development team’s.
Screening for real experience, not buzzwords
Buzzword-heavy CVs list every tool in the cloud native landscape. Strong candidates instead talk fluently about trade-offs. Useful signals during screening include:
- Depth over breadth. Someone who can explain, in detail, how they migrated one system to Kubernetes is usually more valuable than someone who has “touched” ten platforms superficially.
- Cost and security awareness. Good platform engineers can discuss cloud cost trade-offs and basic security posture without being prompted twice.
- Automation instinct. Ask what they have automated recently and why. Manual, repeatable toil left unaddressed is a red flag.
- Communication under pressure. DevOps and SRE roles involve cross-team incident handling. Ask them to walk you through explaining a production issue to a non-technical stakeholder.
At OpenSource, every candidate is technically screened by the founders before a client meets them, specifically to filter out CVs that read well but do not hold up under questioning.
What DevOps engineers earn
Pay for DevOps and platform roles in the UK varies by seniority, sector, and whether the role includes on-call responsibility or people management. Rather than quote figures that will date quickly, we maintain current, evidence-based ranges in our UK Tech Salary Report 2026, which is worth reviewing before setting a budget or making an offer.
Choosing the right hiring route
A one-off senior hire often suits contingent recruitment, while building out a platform team from scratch may be better served by retained search or an embedded recruitment partnership that sits inside your business during a scale-up phase. See how these engagement models compare on our services page. If DevOps sits alongside broader engineering hiring, our software engineering recruitment and AI and data teams, and the other industries we hire for, can coordinate the search so pipelines do not compete with each other.
How we help
We screen every DevOps and platform candidate ourselves before you meet them, so you are only interviewing people who can back up their CV under technical questioning. If you are hiring for this kind of role and want a founder-led view of the market, get in touch or browse our current jobs to see who we are already speaking to.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between DevOps and SRE?
DevOps is a set of practices for building, deploying and operating software with shared ownership between development and operations. SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) is a specific implementation of those ideas, with a stronger focus on measurable reliability, error budgets and formal incident processes. Many UK companies use the titles interchangeably, so job title alone tells you little about what the person actually does.
How long does it take to hire a DevOps engineer?
For a contingent search, expect four to eight weeks from brief to offer, depending on seniority and how tightly you have defined the role. Retained search or embedded recruitment can move faster because the process is prioritised and candidates are pre-screened against your specific stack.
Should a DevOps engineer be able to write production code?
Yes, for most roles. Good DevOps and platform engineers write and review real application or infrastructure code, not just YAML and shell scripts. If a candidate cannot walk you through a non-trivial pull request they have written, treat that as a warning sign.
What salary should I expect to pay for a DevOps engineer in the UK?
Pay varies significantly by seniority, sector and location. Rather than quote figures that go stale, we keep current, evidence-based ranges in our UK Tech Salary Report 2026.