DevOps Engineer Jobs

A DevOps engineer maintains the pipeline between a developer's laptop and live production. The day-to-day work is building and fixing CI/CD pipelines, writing the infrastructure-as-code that provisions cloud environments, packaging applications into containers, and being on call when a deployment fails overnight. Most of it is automation: a task done by hand twice is usually scripted the third time. A typical week splits between writing code, reviewing other engineers' infrastructure changes, and incident work.

The stack is fairly settled. AWS appears in the most UK listings, with Azure second and GCP a distant third. Terraform is the default for infrastructure-as-code, Docker for containers and Kubernetes for orchestration. Pipelines run on GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or Jenkins, increasingly with Argo CD for deployments. Scripting is mostly Python and Bash, and Go appears in the more platform-heavy roles. Observability commonly means Prometheus and Grafana for metrics, the ELK stack for logs and OpenTelemetry for tracing. Certifications such as the AWS Solutions Architect Associate, Certified Kubernetes Administrator and HashiCorp Terraform Associate help a CV pass initial screening, though they don't replace the technical interview.

Pay tracks the combination of AWS, Kubernetes and Terraform, which is what tends to move the band. Junior roles run roughly £35k-£50k, mid-level £55k-£75k, and senior £80k-£110k, with principal and staff roles in London fintech reaching past £130k, or around £600 a day on contract (the recent London median for senior contracts). Remote and hybrid arrangements are common rather than exceptional; fully remote roles often pay within about ten percent of London rates, and a day or two in the office a week is typical. Progression usually runs into SRE, platform engineering or cloud architecture rather than line management.