GitOps is a way of operating infrastructure and deployments in which a Git repository describes the desired state of the system, and an automated tool makes sure reality matches what is written.
In practice, application configuration (often Kubernetes manifests or Helm charts) lives in Git. An agent installed in the cluster, such as Argo CD or Flux, continuously compares the actual state with the declared state and corrects any drift. To deploy a new version, you do not run a command on the server: you merge a pull request.
The benefits come from Git itself: a history of every change, review by a colleague before it is applied, rollback by reverting a commit, and rebuilding an identical environment.
The term was coined by Weaveworks in 2017. GitOps is mostly used with Kubernetes, alongside Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, OpenTofu), which creates the underlying infrastructure.
Why it matters when hiring
GitOps is a skill of DevOps engineers, SREs and Platform Engineers. The good signal: being able to explain how secrets, multiple environments and an emergency rollback are handled with this model. A candidate who has only installed Argo CD on a test cluster has not faced these questions. There is no point requiring it if the company does not use Kubernetes.