DevOps
DevOps = the bridge between those who code and those who operate
DevOps is both a culture and a job. The culture aims to bring development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams closer together in order to ship more often and more safely. The DevOps engineer's job is to build and automate the chain that takes code to production, and the infrastructure that runs it.
The movement emerged around 2009, notably with the first DevOpsDays conferences, in reaction to the walls between developers who wanted to ship fast and operations teams in charge of stability.
Day to day, the DevOps engineer sets up CI/CD pipelines, describes infrastructure as code (Terraform), manages containers and orchestrators (Docker, Kubernetes), monitoring and the security of cloud environments. The title overlaps with other roles: the SRE focuses on the measured reliability of services, the Platform Engineer on a self-service internal platform for developers.
Why it matters when hiring
The DevOps title is used for very varied profiles, from the system administrator who learned Terraform to the engineer who designs a platform for hundreds of developers. In an interview, ask what the candidate automated, what time or incident it saved, and how they handled on-call. The first DevOps hire usually comes when production becomes critical and developers can no longer carry the infrastructure on their own.