DevOps engineer career path at tech companies · 168 roles · 90 days to Oct 16, 2026
Updated
In short
Of the 168 DevOps engineer roles at tech companies in the 90 days to Oct 16, 2026, 77 are senior, more than at any other level. Platform engineer roles share 8 of the 13 required skills listed for DevOps engineer roles; no other role shares more.
Levels in order
Each level counts its own roles. A median shows only where 50 or more of that level’s roles state pay, and each is taken over a different set of roles.
| Level | Roles | Median stated pay | At least half ask for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Junior DevOps engineer | 11 roles | Not shown | 2+ years, 7 of 11 |
| Mid-level DevOps engineer | 46 roles | Not shown | 3+ years, 41 of 41 |
| Senior DevOps engineer | 77 roles | Not shown | 5+ years, 63 of 68 (93%) |
| Staff DevOps engineer | 4 roles | Not shown | 10+ years, 2 of 3 |
| Principal DevOps engineer | 1 role | Not shown | Not shown |
| Lead DevOps engineer | 8 roles | Not shown | 5+ years, 6 of 6 |
Lead titles say who leads a team, not a step above principal, so lead is listed last and not compared with the level before it.
What rises at the next level
No two neighbouring levels have 50 or more roles whose requirements we read, so no level is compared with the next yet.
Roles closest to DevOps engineer, by shared skills
Compared over each role’s most-required skills, umbrella labels such as “Programming” left out. The more skills two roles share, the shorter the move between them.
Platform engineer213 roles
8 shared: CI/CD, Python, Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS, Docker, Infrastructure as Code, Azure
Median stated pay: $176.8k a year
Site reliability engineer219 roles
7 shared: CI/CD, Python, Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS, Infrastructure as Code, Linux
Median stated pay: $184k a year
Software architect87 roles
6 shared: CI/CD, Python, Kubernetes, AWS, Infrastructure as Code, Azure
Security engineer392 roles
5 shared: Python, Kubernetes, AWS, Scripting, Azure
Median stated pay: $197.5k a year
More on DevOps engineer roles
How we count: 168 roles from 156 employers in the 90 days to Oct 16, 2026, each role counted once however many boards post it. Methodology