DevOps Engineer

What is a DevOps Engineer?

A DevOps engineer builds and maintains the infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and operational tooling that enables software to ship reliably and quickly. They sit at the intersection of development and operations — automating the repetitive, reducing the fragile, and giving product engineers the confidence to deploy without fear. At a startup, DevOps engineers are often the first infrastructure hire, building foundational systems from scratch.

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At what stage should you hire a DevOps Engineer?

Most startups hire a dedicated DevOps engineer at Series A, once the team is shipping to production frequently and manual deployment processes are creating risk or slowing the team down. The signal: engineers are spending significant time on infrastructure tasks rather than product work, or deployment incidents are occurring because of fragile, manual processes.

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Common titles for this role

• DevOps Engineer
• Infrastructure Engineer
• Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
• Platform Engineer
• Cloud Engineer
• Build and Release Engineer

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Typical background

Strong startup DevOps engineers have built CI/CD pipelines from scratch and managed cloud infrastructure at real scale. RFS looks for candidates with hands-on Kubernetes and Terraform experience, a strong security posture, and the ability to treat infrastructure as code. Many of our placed DevOps engineers come from high-growth Series B/C companies where they owned production infrastructure for 50–200 person engineering teams.

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What does a DevOps Engineer do at a startup?

• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines: GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI, or similar
• Manage cloud infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Pulumi, or CDK
• Orchestrate containerized workloads with Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, or AKS)
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and on-call tooling: Datadog, PagerDuty, Grafana
• Manage secrets, access control, and security configuration
• Optimize cloud costs: right-sizing, reserved instances, spot instances
• Partner with product engineers to improve local development environments

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Key skills and qualifications

• Strong cloud platform expertise: AWS, GCP, or Azure — ideally with professional certification
• Kubernetes orchestration: deployment, scaling, networking, storage
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform (most common at startups), Pulumi, or AWS CDK
• Scripting proficiency: Bash, Python, or Go for automation
• CI/CD pipeline design and maintenance
• Security mindset: IAM, secrets management, network policies, vulnerability scanning

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Why hire your DevOps Engineer through RFS?

• Infrastructure hiring is highly technical and easy to get wrong — we screen for real Kubernetes and IaC depth, not just cloud familiarity
• 29-day average time to hire — DevOps searches move fast with our pre-vetted candidate pool
• 300+ placements at VC-backed startups across engineering functions
• Pre-vetted for both technical depth and startup adaptability — engineers who build, not just maintain
• No upfront fees — contingency model