Hiring a devops engineer in San Francisco? Across 208 live devops engineer postings in San Francisco, the market pays a $208K median salary (typically $173K–$230K). Recruiting from Scratch is the contingency technical recruiting firm for these hires — a 29-day average time to hire, 300+ placements, and a 2M+ candidate network.
A devops engineer owns CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, and reliability so engineering teams ship safely and fast. Hiring one in San Francisco means competing with the companies below.
What employers actually screen for, aggregated across 208 active devops engineer postings in San Francisco:
| Percentile | Base salary |
|---|---|
| 25th | $173K |
| Median | $208K |
| 75th | $230K |
Based on 136 devops engineer postings in San Francisco that disclose pay. Base only — equity is typically on top.
San Francisco pays about 24% above the US median for this role ($168K).
The companies with the most live devops engineer openings in San Francisco, with what each pays and screens for (medians shown only where at least 3 postings disclose pay):
| Company | Open devops engineer roles | Median pay (disclosed) | Top skills |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple | 9 | — | Python, Java, Kubernetes |
| Okta | 9 | $221K | Terraform, Kubernetes, CI/CD |
| 8 | — | — | |
| Tesla | 7 | — | Python, Go, Kubernetes |
| Illumio | 6 | $183K | Python, Go, AWS |
| Alembic | 4 | $225K | Python, Airflow, Kafka |
| Duo | 4 | — | — |
| Mithril | 3 | — | Python, Go, Rust |
| OpenToken | 3 | — | AWS, Python, Go |
| Air Apps | 3 | $152K | Python, AWS, GCP |
Where the devops engineer demand sits across funding stages, across the 126 companies with the most live openings in San Francisco:
| Stage | Companies hiring | Open roles | Median pay (disclosed) | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | 12 | 20 | $213K | Google, DensityAI, Specter |
| Series A | 12 | 18 | $173K | Mithril, Pulse, Hyperbolic |
| Series B | 13 | 24 | $222K | Alembic, Air Apps, Plenful |
| Series C | 13 | 19 | $211K | nScale, Latent, EarnIn |
| Series D+ | 23 | 42 | $230K | Illumio, Duo, OpenToken |
| Public | 17 | 43 | $207K | Apple, Okta, Tesla |
A further 36 of those companies have no funding stage on file and are not shown above.
Recruiting from Scratch is a contingency technical recruiting firm — no retainer and no upfront cost, so you pay only when you make a hire. The process: align on the role and must-haves → a curated shortlist of 3–5 genuinely qualified DevOps engineers (not resume volume) → a 29-day average time to hire versus the 49-day industry average → a 90-day replacement guarantee. Backed by 300+ placements, a 2M+ candidate network, and named hires at companies like Decagon and Mercor.
A devops engineer owns CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, and reliability so engineering teams ship safely and fast.
What salary does a devops engineer in San Francisco command in 2026?Across 208 live postings in San Francisco, a $208K median salary (typically $173K–$230K) — base only; equity is typically on top. Most postings expect 5+ years of experience.
What should you look for when hiring a devops engineer?Depth in the skills these postings require (Kubernetes, Python, AWS, CI/CD, Terraform, Go, GCP, Docker), plus cloud, infrastructure-as-code, and observability depth plus an SRE mindset. Recruiting from Scratch sends a shortlist of 3–5 genuinely qualified candidates, not resume volume.
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