Tech · Updated 16 September 2026
Cloud / DevOps Engineer salary and career roadmap
Own the infrastructure and the delivery pipeline that get other people's code into production safely, for a median of about $170,500 total compensation among DevOps-focused engineers reporting to Levels.fyi.
Salary data checked · outlook from BLS projections released · by Bilal Tahir
- What it is
- A Cloud or DevOps Engineer is an engineer who builds and runs the platform other developers deploy onto: infrastructure defined in code with Terraform, containers and Kubernetes, continuous integration and delivery pipelines, observability, cloud identity and cost control, and the on-call response when any of it breaks.
- Salary
- A Cloud or DevOps Engineer in the United States earns a median of $95,000 entering the field, $134,050 at mid-career and $170,500 at senior level; the top end is $300,000. (Levels.fyi United States software engineer reports with a DevOps focus (2,188 reports), anchored to BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics May 2025 for network administrators and network architects, )
- Outlook
- Employment is projected to grow 8% over the ten years to 2036, with about 23,000 US openings a year. (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, 15-1241 Computer Network Architects and 15-1244 Network and Computer Systems Administrators (there is no BLS occupation code for DevOps Engineer), )
- Time to first job
- A career changer starting from zero typically needs 12 to 30 months at 10-15 hours a week to reach a first offer.
- Cost to get in
- The cheapest verified route in (Developer to platform engineer) costs about $300; the most expensive costs about $1,200.
- Roadmap
- Our Cloud or DevOps Engineer roadmap is 8 steps and about 850 study hours; the fastest route in is Cloud support engineer at a provider or MSP at about 12 months.
- Degree
- No degree is legally required and this is one of the few technology fields where certifications carry genuine screening weight, so AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate plus a public Terraform repository substitutes for one at most employers; large enterprises and federal contractors still list a bachelor's degree as a preference, and a security clearance moves you past that filter entirely.
- Automation exposure
- Medium. Infrastructure as code and AI assistants have already eliminated manual provisioning, which used to be the entry-level work, and that is one reason the ladder into this field now starts in help desk or cloud support rather than in junior system administration. What does not automate is judgment about failure: deciding that a release is not going out, finding the cause of a 503 at 2am, and designing a system whose blast radius is small enough to survive a mistake.
What does a Cloud or DevOps Engineer do?
A Cloud or DevOps Engineer is an engineer who builds and runs the platform other developers deploy onto: infrastructure defined in code with Terraform, containers and Kubernetes, continuous integration and delivery pipelines, observability, cloud identity and cost control, and the on-call response when any of it breaks. A cloud or DevOps engineer builds and runs the platform everyone else deploys onto. The same work is also posted as Cloud Engineer, Platform Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, Systems Engineer.
A cloud or DevOps engineer builds and runs the platform everyone else deploys onto. That means infrastructure defined in code (Terraform), containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), CI/CD pipelines, observability, cost control, identity and access management, and the incident response that happens when any of it breaks at 3am. The job titles overlap heavily: cloud engineer, platform engineer, site reliability engineer, infrastructure engineer, DevOps engineer. The common thread is that your users are other engineers, and your product is the speed and safety with which they ship.
The people who do well here tend to be systematic, suspicious, and allergic to manual steps. They like the puzzle of why a request takes 400ms instead of 40ms, they write runbooks, and they are comfortable being the person who says a release is not going out today. It suits career changers from IT support, sysadmin, network administration or QA better than almost any other tech role, because the underlying skills (Linux, networking, troubleshooting under pressure) transfer directly and the market values demonstrable hands-on ability over a degree.
The honest tradeoffs: this is not really an entry-level career. Almost nobody is hired as a DevOps engineer with zero experience, because the role means production access and the blast radius of a mistake is the whole company. The usual route is two to four years in help desk, sysadmin, NOC or junior development first. On-call is normal, not exceptional. And the classic on-premises version of the job is shrinking: BLS projects network and computer systems administrator employment to fall 4% from 2025 to 2035, even as computer network architects grow 8%. The work is moving to cloud and platform, so the direction you point yourself matters more here than in most fields.
Why Cloud or DevOps Engineer pay is high
Two multipliers stack. First, downtime is priced: an hour of outage at a mid-sized SaaS company costs more in lost revenue, SLA credits and churn than a DevOps engineer's monthly salary, so the role is bought as insurance as much as capability. Second, cloud spend is enormous and badly optimised; an engineer who cuts a $2m annual AWS bill by 25% pays for themselves several times in a single quarter. Add scarcity: the skill set spans software engineering, networking, security and operations, which takes years to accumulate and cannot be certified into existence. Employers therefore pay a premium over comparable-tenure application engineers at the same company, and they pay it in cash more than equity because the role exists at non-tech firms too.
What's good
- Certifications genuinely carry weight here, unlike in application development, which gives a non-degree candidate a clear ladder
- Transfers directly from IT support, networking and military technical backgrounds
- Demand exists in every industry, not only at software companies, so you are not tied to a tech hub
- Strong pay with a high cash component: Levels.fyi DevOps-focus base median is $150,000 against a $170,500 total median
- Cost savings and prevented outages are measurable, which makes promotion cases easy to argue
What's hard
- On-call: nights, weekends and interrupted holidays are a standard part of the role
- Not an entry-level job; expect two to four years in an adjacent role first
- The blast radius of a mistake is company-wide, and the stress is real
- BLS projects a 4% decline for network and computer systems administrators from 2025 to 2035, so the legacy version of this job is shrinking
- Constant tooling churn; the Kubernetes ecosystem alone reinvents itself every couple of years
- You are a cost centre in most organisations, which shows up in budget conversations
What a Cloud or DevOps Engineer does all day
- 08:45 Check dashboards and overnight alerts; acknowledge anything the on-call handed over
- 09:15 Stand-up with the platform team, plus a short sync with whichever product team is blocked
- 09:45 Review a Terraform pull request from an application engineer and explain why the security group is too open
- 11:00 Build work: migrate a service to a new Kubernetes ingress, staged behind a canary
- 13:00 Interrupt: a deploy pipeline is failing for everyone; triage, find the expired registry credential, rotate it, write it up
- 14:30 Cost review, tag a batch of untagged resources and delete two idle environments
- 15:30 Write the runbook for the alert you added last week so the next on-call does not page you
- 16:30 Pair with a developer on why their pod cannot reach the database (it is DNS, or the security group)
- One week in four or six: on-call, carrying the pager overnight and on the weekend
Cloud or DevOps Engineer salary in 2026: by level
US, annual, USD. Base plus typical bonus where the source reports it.
A US Cloud or DevOps Engineer earns a median of $95,000 entering the field, $134,050 at two to four years and $170,500 at senior level, with the top end at $300,000. These are base-salary figures in US dollars as of September 2026, synthesised from Levels.fyi United States software engineer reports with a DevOps focus (2,188 reports), anchored to BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics May 2025 for network administrators and network architects. Pay varies about 20-35% by metro.
Levels.fyi US reports for software engineers with a DevOps focus (n=2,188, retrieved 15 September 2026): $96,750 (10th pct), $125,000 (25th), $170,500 (median), $225,000 (75th), $300,000 (90th), with a base-pay median of $150,000 - note the smaller equity component than product engineering. Solution architects on Levels.fyi (n=1,321) report $124,500 / $167,000 / $215,000 / $278,700 / $345,700 across the same percentiles. BLS May 2025 wages for the traditional on-premises versions of this work are lower and are the realistic anchor outside big tech: network and computer systems administrators $99,130 median (10th pct $62,640, 90th pct $155,050) and computer network architects $134,050 median (10th pct $79,900, 90th pct $202,680). Entry pay depends almost entirely on where you start: a help desk or NOC role is commonly $45,000-$65,000, a cloud support engineer at a hyperscaler $70,000-$95,000. On-call compensation varies from nothing to a flat weekly stipend; ask about it in the offer conversation.
There is no single BLS occupation called 'DevOps engineer', so read two series together. Network and computer systems administrators are projected to decline 4% from 2025 to 2035 (323,600 jobs in 2025, about 13,200 fewer by 2035), with roughly 13,400 openings a year purely from replacement. Computer network architects are projected to grow 8% over the same period (181,800 jobs, about 9,600 openings a year). That split is the whole story: the on-premises server-administration job is shrinking while the design-and-automate-the-cloud job is growing. Software developers, whose projections cover much platform engineering work, grow 10%. Automation risk is medium and mostly internal to the role: infrastructure-as-code and AI assistants have eliminated manual provisioning, which was entry-level work, while raising demand for people who can design systems and debug them under pressure. The durable skill is judgement about failure, not memorised CLI flags.
“Employment of computer network architects is projected to grow 8 percent from 2025 to 2035, much faster than the average for all occupations.”
Cloud or DevOps Engineer salary by city
National bands scaled by metro wage differentials from the BLS May 2025 OEWS release.
Cloud or DevOps Engineer pay is highest in San Jose / Silicon Valley (mid-career median about $190,351, ×1.42 the national figure) and lowest among large metros in Salt Lake City (about $127,348). The multiplier moves the offer, not what you keep after rent and state tax.
| Metro | Entry | Mid | Senior | vs national |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| San Jose / Silicon Valley | $134,900 | $190,351 | $242,110 | ×1.42 |
| San Francisco Bay Area | $128,250 | $180,968 | $230,175 | ×1.35 |
| New York City | $121,600 | $171,584 | $218,240 | ×1.28 |
| Seattle | $114,000 | $160,860 | $204,600 | ×1.2 |
| Boston | $109,250 | $154,158 | $196,075 | ×1.15 |
| Washington DC metro | $106,400 | $150,136 | $190,960 | ×1.12 |
| Los Angeles | $102,600 | $144,774 | $184,140 | ×1.08 |
| Chicago | $99,750 | $140,752 | $179,025 | ×1.05 |
| Austin | $99,750 | $140,752 | $179,025 | ×1.05 |
| San Diego | $98,800 | $139,412 | $177,320 | ×1.04 |
| Denver | $96,900 | $136,731 | $173,910 | ×1.02 |
| Philadelphia | $96,900 | $136,731 | $173,910 | ×1.02 |
| Dallas | $95,000 | $134,050 | $170,500 | ×1.0 |
| Minneapolis | $95,000 | $134,050 | $170,500 | ×1.0 |
| Raleigh-Durham | $95,000 | $134,050 | $170,500 | ×1.0 |
| Houston | $94,050 | $132,710 | $168,795 | ×0.99 |
| Atlanta | $93,100 | $131,369 | $167,090 | ×0.98 |
| Phoenix | $90,250 | $127,348 | $161,975 | ×0.95 |
| Miami | $90,250 | $127,348 | $161,975 | ×0.95 |
| Salt Lake City | $90,250 | $127,348 | $161,975 | ×0.95 |
A multiplier raises the number on the offer letter, not what you keep. San Francisco pays about 35% more than the national median for these roles, but median Bay Area rent and California state income tax eat most of that for anyone below the senior rung. Texas, Florida, Washington, Tennessee and Nevada levy no state income tax, which is worth roughly 4-10% of take-home versus California or New York City, where city tax stacks on top of state tax. Run the comparison on after-tax income minus housing before you move. Fully remote roles are the edge case worth chasing: a national pay band spent in a 0.88 cost market beats a 1.35 salary spent in a 1.6 cost market for most people.
How the multipliers are derived
Anchor: the BLS May 2025 OEWS national mean wage across all occupations is $33.54/hr ($69,770/yr). Metro all-occupation means from the same release: San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara $57.32 (1.71x national), San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont $48.19 (1.44x), Washington-Arlington-Alexandria $44.20 (1.32x), Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue $44.13 (1.32x), Boston-Cambridge-Newton $43.09 (1.28x), New York-Newark-Jersey City $41.50 (1.24x), Denver-Aurora-Centennial $39.28 (1.17x), Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell $34.57 (1.03x), Chicago-Naperville-Elgin $34.42 (1.03x, May 2024), Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington $33.96 (1.01x), Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler $33.48 (1.00x). We damp the top end of those raw ratios. All-occupation means exaggerate the gap for the careers on this site, because national pay bands, remote hiring and company-wide equity grids compress geographic spread for high-skill professional roles more than they do for service and hourly work. Levels.fyi shows the same damping: its Bay Area software engineer average total compensation of about $291k sits roughly 1.3x-1.4x the US median, not 1.7x. Non-US multipliers convert local market rates to USD and are directional, not survey-grade.
How to become a Cloud or DevOps Engineer
Every route we could verify, with honest time, cost and difficulty.
There are 5 routes we could verify into Cloud or DevOps Engineer work. The fastest is Cloud support engineer at a provider or MSP at about 12 months; the cheapest is Developer to platform engineer at about $300. Almost nobody is hired straight into a Cloud or DevOps Engineer title with no professional experience, because the role carries production access; the route that produces most hires is an adjacent ticket-based job first - help desk, network operations centre, cloud support at a provider or managed service provider, at $45,000 to $65,000 - followed by an internal transfer in 18 to 30 months, usually with the employer paying for the certifications.
IT support or NOC, then internal transfer
Start on a help desk, service desk or network operations centre ($45,000-$65,000), automate your own tickets with scripts, take the cloud certifications your employer will often pay for, and move to the infrastructure team in 18-30 months. By far the most common and most reliable route for someone without a degree.
Cloud support engineer at a provider or MSP
AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and managed service providers hire support engineers with certifications and demonstrable labs rather than degrees. You get paid to see thousands of real customer failures, which is the fastest possible exposure to production problems.
Developer to platform engineer
If you can already write code, learn Linux, networking and Terraform and move sideways. Platform teams increasingly want software engineers, and this is the highest-paid version of the route.
Certification-plus-homelab straight shot
AWS Solutions Architect Associate or AZ-104, plus Terraform Associate and CKA, plus a genuinely public homelab: a multi-environment Terraform repo, a Kubernetes cluster you run, a CI/CD pipeline with monitoring. Possible without prior IT work but the hardest path, because you are asking someone to grant production access on the strength of labs.
Military, trades or ops background conversion
Signals, avionics, industrial controls and similar backgrounds map well onto infrastructure work and often come with a security clearance, which is worth a substantial premium with government contractors and moves you past the degree filter entirely.
Cloud or DevOps Engineer roadmap: 8 steps, 850 hours
Becoming a Cloud or DevOps Engineer from zero takes about 850 study hours across 8 steps, roughly 12 to 30 months at 10-15 hours a week plus a job search. Step one is Linux and networking to a level you can defend under questioning. Linux and networking come first because every cloud abstraction is a Linux box and a network behind a nicer API, and candidates who skip that step can click through a console but cannot debug why a pod cannot reach a database, which is the actual interview question. The cloud certification comes second as the keyword filter that gets a resume read, and Terraform, Kubernetes and the pipeline come after it because they are what you are asked to demonstrate.
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1
Install Linux on a spare machine or VM and live in it. File system and permissions, users and groups, systemd, processes, package management, logs with journalctl, cron, SSH keys. Then networking: the OSI layers you actually use, TCP handshake, subnetting, DNS resolution end to end, HTTP and TLS, what a load balancer does, what NAT does.
Why now: Every cloud abstraction is a Linux box and a network behind a nicer API. Candidates who skip this can click through a console but cannot debug why a pod cannot reach a database, which is the actual interview question.
- course Linux Basics Course (part of the DevOps learning path)KodeKloud · 20 h · Subscription (Standard / Pro / AI tiers, annual billing discounted; prices load on the pricing page)
- course Introduction to Bash and Learn Bash ScriptingfreeCodeCamp · 25 h · Free
- cert CompTIA Network+ (study for it even if you do not sit it)CompTIA · 70 h · About $400 for the voucher; free study outlines
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2
Pick AWS unless your target employers are Microsoft shops, in which case pick Azure. Learn compute, storage, VPC networking, IAM, managed databases, load balancers, DNS, logging and billing. Build everything by hand in the console once so you understand what the automation will later replace. Then sit the associate exam.
Why now: The certification is not the point; it is the forcing function and the keyword filter. AWS Solutions Architect Associate ($150), Azure AZ-104 ($165) or Google Associate Cloud Engineer ($125) are the three that recruiters screen on, and for a career changer without a degree they are the cheapest credible signal available.
- cert AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03)Amazon Web Services · 100 h · $150 exam fee
- course AWS Skill Builder individual subscription (Builder Labs, Cloud Quest, official practice exams)AWS Skill Builder · 60 h · Free tier available; $29/month individual, or $449/year which adds Digital Classrooms
- course Cloud+ plan (all A Cloud Guru courses and labs, including AWS and Azure certification paths)Pluralsight · 80 h · Core Tech $49/month or $449/year; Cloud+ adds $29/month or $299/year; 10-day free trial excluding labs
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3
Python to the level of writing a tool that calls an API, parses JSON, handles errors and is tested; or Go if you are heading toward platform engineering. Plus Git beyond commit and push: branching strategy, rebasing, pull request review, and tagging releases.
Why now: DevOps is software engineering applied to operations. The line between 'senior sysadmin' and 'DevOps engineer' is mostly whether you can write and maintain code that other people depend on.
- course 100 Days of Code: The Complete Python Pro BootcampUdemy (Dr. Angela Yu) · 60 h · $119.99 list, frequently $12-$20 on sale
- course Python Certification (v9 curriculum)freeCodeCamp · 100 h · Free
- book Pro Git, 2nd editionScott Chacon and Ben Straub · 15 h · Free online
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4
Providers, resources, state and remote state locking, variables and outputs, modules, workspaces, plan and apply discipline, drift, and how to structure a repository for dev/staging/prod. Rebuild the environment you clicked together in step 2 entirely in code, then destroy and recreate it to prove it works.
Why now: Clicking in a console is not a job any more. Terraform is the default answer at most employers, the exam is cheap ($70.50), and 'I have a public Terraform repo that stands up a three-tier environment' is a sentence that gets interviews.
- cert HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate (004)HashiCorp · 40 h · $70.50 plus tax; valid 2 years
- course Terraform learning path with hands-on labsKodeKloud · 25 h · Subscription; annual billing discounted, 30-day money-back guarantee
- practice HashiCorp Developer tutorials for TerraformHashiCorp · 20 h · Free
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5
Docker first: images, layers, multi-stage builds, volumes, networks, registries, and why your image is 1.2GB when it should be 80MB. Then Kubernetes: pods, deployments, services, ingress, config maps and secrets, resource limits, RBAC, and above all troubleshooting a cluster from the command line under time pressure.
Why now: CKA is the most respected credential in this space precisely because it is performance-based: two hours at a live terminal fixing real clusters, not multiple choice. At $445 with a free retake included it is the most expensive item on this roadmap and the one that most reliably converts into interviews for infrastructure roles.
- cert Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)CNCF / Linux Foundation · 100 h · $445 including one free retake
- course Kubernetes learning path (20 courses, includes CKA preparation and labs)KodeKloud · 60 h · Subscription; annual billing discounted
- practice Kubernetes the Hard WayKelsey Hightower (GitHub) · 20 h · Free
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6
Build a pipeline that lints, tests, builds an image, pushes it, deploys to staging, runs smoke tests and promotes to production with an approval gate and a rollback path. Then instrument the service: Prometheus metrics, structured logs, a Grafana dashboard, an alert with a meaningful threshold, and a written runbook for that alert.
Why now: This is the deliverable of the job. Interviews for DevOps roles are largely 'walk me through your pipeline and what happens when the deploy fails at 2am', and an alert plus runbook plus postmortem shows operational maturity that no certificate demonstrates.
- practice GitHub Actions documentation and starter workflowsGitHub · 25 h · Free for public repositories
- book Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production SystemsGoogle (O'Reilly) · 30 h · Free online; about $50 in print
- course 100 Days of DevOps hands-on challengeKodeKloud · 100 h · Subscription
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7
Least-privilege IAM, secrets management, network segmentation, encryption at rest and in transit, patching, backup and restore that you have actually tested. Then cost: tagging, right-sizing, reserved capacity, and finding the forgotten $900-a-month load balancer.
Why now: Two things get infrastructure engineers noticed by executives: an avoided breach and a reduced bill. 'I cut our non-production AWS spend 31% in one quarter' is the single most useful line you can put on a CV, and it is available to you even in a junior IT role.
- course AWS Well-Architected Framework training and the security pillarAWS Skill Builder · 20 h · Free
- practice Cloud cost review of your own homelab account, documented as a write-upSelf-directed · 20 h · Free
- course Security+ plan cybersecurity contentPluralsight · 20 h · $29/month or $299/year on top of Core Tech
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8
Apply to cloud support, junior sysadmin, NOC, IT operations and MSP roles as well as junior DevOps openings. In interviews, lead with the Terraform repository, the Kubernetes cluster and the pipeline, and talk about failures you caused and fixed. Once inside, volunteer for the on-call rotation, own the migration nobody wants, and ask your employer to pay for the next certification.
Why now: Almost nobody is hired straight into a DevOps title with no professional experience, because the role carries production access. The reliable move is to get inside a company on an adjacent ticket-based job and convert within 18-30 months, which also means your certifications and training are usually employer-funded from that point on.
- practice Public GitHub portfolio: Terraform modules, Helm charts, pipeline definitions with a clear READMEGitHub · 40 h · Free
- practice Local cloud-native and Kubernetes meetups (CNCF community groups)CNCF · 30 h · Free
- practice Levels.fyi and BLS wage data for the offer negotiationLevels.fyi · 4 h · Free
Best certifications for a Cloud or DevOps Engineer
Which ones matter, what they cost, and how often people pass.
No certification is required, but they matter more here than in any other software career because recruiters screen on them. The one with the most screening value for a first cloud role is AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate at $150, realistically $165 to $500 all in with a course, about 80 to 150 hours of study; Microsoft AZ-104 at $165 and Google Associate Cloud Engineer at $125 are the equivalents in those ecosystems. The Certified Kubernetes Administrator at $445, including one free retake and two Killer.sh simulator sessions, carries the most signal with experienced interviewers because it is two hours at a live terminal rather than multiple choice, and HashiCorp Terraform Associate at $70.50 is the cheapest credible addition. AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner at $100 is an orientation course, not a hiring credential.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03)
Amazon Web Services
- Cost
- $150
- Study
- 80-120
- Pass rate
- Not published by AWS; 65 questions, 130 minutes, AWS recommends at least 1 year of hands-on experience
Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer
Google Cloud
- Cost
- $125 (renewal exam $75)
- Study
- 80-120
- Pass rate
- Not published; 50-60 questions in 2 hours, valid 3 years, 6+ months hands-on recommended
Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104)
Microsoft
- Cost
- $165 in the United States
- Study
- 80-120
- Pass rate
- Not published; 100-minute proctored exam, free annual renewal on Microsoft Learn
HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate (004)
HashiCorp
- Cost
- $70.50 plus local taxes
- Study
- 30-50
- Pass rate
- Not published; 1-hour exam, credential valid 2 years
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
Cloud Native Computing Foundation / Linux Foundation
- Cost
- $445, including one free retake
- Study
- 100-150
- Pass rate
- Not published; 2-hour performance-based exam at a live command line, updated quarterly to track Kubernetes releases
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Amazon Web Services
- Cost
- $100
- Study
- 20-40
- Pass rate
- Not published
CompTIA Network+
CompTIA
- Cost
- About $400 (CompTIA raised exam prices across the range in June 2026; check the store)
- Study
- 60-90
- Pass rate
- Not published
Skills employers screen for
Soft skills that decide offers: Staying methodical during an outage, Writing documentation other engineers will actually read, Saying no to an unsafe release without becoming the blocker everyone routes around, Blameless postmortem writing, Translating infrastructure risk into business terms for non-engineers, Patience with repetitive support work while you build the automation that ends it.
Best courses for a Cloud or DevOps Engineer
Checked on the provider's page on 16 September 2026. Some links are affiliate links.
We list 6 courses for Cloud or DevOps Engineer work, checked on the provider's page. Pick one subscription that comes with hands-on labs - KodeKloud or Pluralsight - work a single cloud certification path end to end, and then stop buying courses and put the remaining hours into the public repository, because 'I have a Terraform repo that stands up a three-tier environment, a cluster I run and a pipeline with a rollback path' is the sentence that actually gets interviews.
Browse more Cloud or DevOps Engineer courses on Coursera Coursera Plus covers most of the courses above for one monthly fee.
Cloud or DevOps Engineer interview questions and format
A Cloud or DevOps Engineer loop is typically four to five stages over two to five weeks: a recruiter screen, a technical screen on Linux, networking and cloud fundamentals, a hands-on exercise such as writing Terraform for a described environment or debugging a broken Kubernetes manifest, a systems design and incident round, and a behavioural round on on-call and blameless postmortems. The stage that filters most candidates is the incident round, where 'a service is returning 503s, walk me through your investigation' separates people who have run production from people who have only studied it.
Usually four to five stages: recruiter screen, a technical screen on Linux, networking and cloud fundamentals, a hands-on exercise (write Terraform for a described environment, or debug a broken Kubernetes manifest, sometimes live and sometimes as a take-home), a systems design and incident round ('a service is returning 503s, walk me through your investigation'), and a behavioural round focused on on-call and blameless postmortems. Performance-based, not algorithm-heavy: expect far fewer LeetCode questions than a software engineering loop and far more troubleshooting.
Questions that come up
- A user reports the site is slow. Walk me through your investigation from DNS to database.
- What actually happens when you run kubectl apply?
- How do you manage Terraform state across a team, and what goes wrong without locking?
- Explain the difference between a Kubernetes service, an ingress and a load balancer.
- How would you design a zero-downtime deployment with a rollback path?
- What is least privilege, and how would you review an over-permissioned IAM role?
- Tell me about an outage you caused. What did the postmortem say?
- How do you keep secrets out of a Git repository, and what do you do if one leaks?
- Where would you look first to cut 20% off this cloud bill?
- How do you decide what deserves an alert versus a dashboard?
Prep
Cloud or DevOps Engineer FAQ
Can I get a DevOps job with no prior IT experience?
Directly, almost never. The role means credentials to production and the ability to take the company offline, so employers want to have watched you work first. The realistic plan is to enter through help desk, NOC, cloud support or junior development, be visibly the person who automates things, and convert internally in 18-30 months. That path also gets your certifications paid for.
Which cloud should I learn first to become a Cloud or DevOps Engineer?
AWS has the largest share of job postings, so it is the default. Choose Azure instead if your area is dominated by Microsoft shops, government or healthcare, and Google Cloud if you are aiming at data or ML-heavy companies. Learn one to depth; the second cloud takes weeks once the first is solid, because the concepts transfer and only the names change.
Are cloud certifications actually worth the money for a DevOps Engineer job?
More than in any other software career. AWS Solutions Architect Associate ($150), Azure AZ-104 ($165), Google Associate Cloud Engineer ($125), Terraform Associate ($70.50) and CKA ($445) are all screened on by recruiters, and CKA in particular is respected because it is a two-hour hands-on exam rather than multiple choice. A certificate without a public repository or homelab behind it, though, reads as a paper qualification and will not survive the technical screen.
What is the difference between DevOps, SRE, platform and cloud engineer?
Mostly emphasis and company size. Cloud engineer leans toward provisioning and migrations, DevOps toward the delivery pipeline, SRE toward reliability targets and error budgets (and usually demands stronger coding), platform engineer toward building internal products for other engineers. The skill set overlaps by roughly 80%, and people move between the titles freely.
How bad is on-call really for a Cloud or DevOps Engineer?
It varies enormously. A mature team with good alerting might page the on-call twice a month; an immature one will page nightly. Ask in the interview how many pages the last rotation got, whether alerts are reviewed and pruned, and whether on-call is compensated. The answers tell you more about the company than anything on the careers page.
What is the fastest thing I can do that gets interviews?
A public repository that stands up a complete environment from nothing: Terraform for the infrastructure, a containerised application, a Kubernetes deployment, a CI/CD pipeline, monitoring and a documented runbook, with a README explaining the tradeoffs. That single artefact answers most of the technical screen before it starts.
What does a Cloud or DevOps Engineer actually do all day?
Roughly half build work and half interruption. A normal day starts with overnight alerts and a stand-up, then reviewing another engineer's Terraform pull request and explaining why a security group is too open, then migrating a service to a new Kubernetes ingress behind a canary. The interruptions are the job too: a deploy pipeline failing for everyone because a registry credential expired, a developer whose pod cannot reach the database, a batch of untagged resources to clean up. One week in four or six you carry the pager overnight and at weekends.
Is Cloud or DevOps Engineer a good career for someone switching at 40?
Yes, and it suits a mid-career switch better than most technology roles. The skills that transfer - Linux, networking, troubleshooting under pressure, writing things down - come from IT support, network administration, military technical trades and industrial controls, all of which are common at 40. The constraint is that this is not an entry-level job: expect 12 to 30 months routed through help desk, network operations or cloud support before a DevOps title. Levels.fyi puts the United States DevOps-focus median total compensation at $170,500 a year, with a base-heavy mix that suits people who need cash now rather than equity later.
How much does a DevOps Engineer make in Seattle versus the national median?
About 20 percent above the national figure. Levels.fyi puts the United States DevOps-focus median total compensation at $170,500 a year, so Seattle sits near $200,000 to $205,000, and the 90th percentile of $300,000 moves toward $360,000. Note that the base-pay median is $150,000 nationally, so more of this is cash than in product engineering. The traditional on-premises comparison is much lower everywhere: BLS puts network and computer systems administrators at a $99,130 median and computer network architects at $134,050.
How long does it take to become a DevOps Engineer while working full time?
Twelve to thirty months at 10 to 15 hours a week, and the variance is about where you start rather than how fast you study. From an existing developer or system administration job, Linux and networking revision, one cloud certification, Terraform, Kubernetes and a pipeline is roughly 730 study hours, which is about twelve months at that pace. From outside IT entirely, add the time to get an adjacent ticket-based job first and then convert internally, which is where the 30-month end of the range comes from.
Sources
Every number on this page traces to one of these. Page checked 16 September 2026.
- levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/focus/devops/locations/united-states
- levels.fyi/t/solution-architect/locations/united-states
- bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/network-and-computer-systems-administrators.htm
- bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/computer-network-architects.htm
- bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm
- aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-solutions-architect-associate/
- cloud.google.com/learn/certification/cloud-engineer
- learn.microsoft.com/en-us/credentials/certifications/azure-administrator/
- developer.hashicorp.com/certifications/infrastructure-automation
- cncf.io/training/certification/cka/
- aws.amazon.com/training/digital/
- pluralsight.com/individuals/pricing
- kodekloud.com/pricing
- freecodecamp.org/learn/