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Summary

The role of senior DevOps engineers has evolved from hands-on technical work to leadership, collaboration, coaching, and designing automation architectures.

Abstract

The article discusses the changing role of senior DevOps engineers, focusing on the shift from technical expertise to leadership, collaboration, and strategic thinking. The author explains that as DevOps has become an established approach, senior engineers now spend more time on leadership, coaching, and mentoring activities. They are responsible for designing the overall systems architecture and automation strategy, while still maintaining a solid technical foundation. The article outlines the core competencies required for senior DevOps engineers today, including thought leadership, strategic planning, building effective teams, and creating a culture of collaboration. The author also provides tips for transitioning from hands-on work to leadership and emphasizes the importance of architecting automation pipelines and coaching and mentoring junior staff.

Bullet points

  • The role of senior DevOps engineers has evolved from hands-on technical work to leadership, collaboration, and strategic thinking.
  • Senior engineers are responsible for designing the overall systems architecture and automation strategy, while still maintaining a solid technical foundation.
  • Core competencies required for senior DevOps engineers include thought leadership, strategic planning, building effective teams, and creating a culture of collaboration.
  • Transitioning from hands-on work to leadership requires a shift in mindset and skills, including delegating tasks, moving from doing to teaching, and focusing on improving team workflows and processes.
  • Architecting automation pipelines is a key competency for senior DevOps engineers, involving choosing the right tools and technologies, incorporating security practices, enabling compliance and governance, implementing infrastructure as code, monitoring and observability, and promoting reliability and resiliency.
  • Coaching and mentoring junior staff is an important part of the senior DevOps engineer's role, requiring patience, empathy, and a focus on constructive feedback and problem-solving skills.
  • The future of DevOps relies on senior leaders who can evolve practices and help teams thrive in an environment of continuous delivery and improvement.

This is Why I Didn’t Accept You as a Senior DevOps Engineer

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

The role of the DevOps engineer has fundamentally changed over the past decade. What used to constitute a senior engineer was someone with deep technical expertise and years of hands-on experience. However, as DevOps has matured as an organizational philosophy, the expectations for senior DevOps leaders have changed dramatically.

Today’s senior DevOps engineers are measured by a different yardstick. While they still need technical competency, they are now judged more on strategic vision, team leadership, coaching skills, and the ability to share a culture of collaboration. Hands-on work takes a back seat to architecting automated solutions and mentorship. Simply having “senior” levels of experience is no longer enough.

This article is an opinionated point of view where I will explain how the DevOps landscape has evolved and why technical expertise alone does not make for effective senior leadership. I will outline the key competencies required for senior DevOps engineers today, which go far beyond pure coding abilities. I aim to provide guidance for aspiring leaders on the well-rounded skillsets needed to manage, motivate, and mentor high-performing teams in a modern DevOps organization.

The Evolution of DevOps

The DevOps movement began around 2008 when the need for better collaboration and integration between development and operations teams became clear. In the past, these two teams often worked in silos, which led to slower software releases, poor communication, and tension between the teams.

The DevOps methodology promoted integrating development and operations staff into cross-functional teams to improve collaboration, increase deployment frequency, and shorten lead times between fixes. Instead of developers “throwing code over the wall” to ops teams, they began working together on the full lifecycle of applications.

This shift from siloed teams to close collaboration marked a seismic change in how technology teams worked together. The segregated dev and ops model was replaced by a culture of shared responsibility and integration of the entire delivery pipeline. Developers gained better visibility into production issues, while ops teams provided earlier feedback on code quality and deployment automation.

The DevOps movement has continued to evolve over the past decade, with practices like continuous delivery, infrastructure as code, and site reliability engineering becoming widespread. However, the core philosophy remains focused on improving collaboration, communication, and culture between teams to deliver better software faster.

The Changing Role of the DevOps Engineer

In the early days of DevOps, the role tended to be very hands-on and focused on technical execution. Senior DevOps engineers spent their time writing scripts, configuring tools, and building out infrastructure.

Today, that has changed dramatically. While technical skills are still important, the senior DevOps role has evolved to be much more about leadership, collaboration, and driving organizational change. Technical expertise takes a backseat to “soft skills” like influencing, empathy, flexibility and strategic thinking.

“Intelligence is not a reliable advantage in a world that’s become as connected as ours has. But flexibility is. If you have flexibility you can wait for good opportunities, both in your career and for your investments. You’ll have a better chance of being able to learn a new skill when it’s necessary. You’ll feel less urgency to chase competitors who can do things you can’t, and have more leeway to find your passion and your niche at your own pace. You can find a new routine, a slower pace, and think about life with a different set of assumptions. The ability to do those things when most others can’t is one of the few things that will set you apart in a world where intelligence is no longer a sustainable advantage.” — Extract from Psychology of Money

The senior DevOps engineer can no longer just focus on automation and their own team. They need to connect with other departments, demonstrate the business value of DevOps, and influence executives to invest in modern systems and processes. They act as an agent of change across the wider organization.

Senior DevOps roles today are focused on breaking down silos, building relationships, mentoring junior staff, and creating a collaborative culture. Hard technical skills are table stakes — the differentiating capabilities are in leadership, communication, and emotional intelligence. The emphasis has shifted from hands-on work to helping teams work better together in a more Agile, iterative way.

So while scripting and cloud architecture skills are still required, they are not what defines a senior level engineer anymore. The technical specialist mold no longer applies — strategic vision and collaboration ability are now the keys to success.

Why Senior DevOps Engineers are Different Now

The role has evolved as the practice of DevOps has matured. In the early days of DevOps, engineers were often still very hands-on, writing scripts and code to implement automated pipelines and core infrastructure. However, as DevOps has become an established approach adopted by most organizations, the day-to-day responsibilities of senior engineers have shifted away from hands-on technical work.

Today, senior engineers spend more of their time on leadership, coaching, and mentoring activities. They are responsible for designing the overall systems architecture and automation strategy. While they still need a solid technical foundation, their primary focus is enabling junior engineers, improving collaboration between teams, and driving cultural change.

Senior DevOps engineers now develop standards and best practices that can be implemented by junior staff and used by the entire engineering team. They coach teams on how to work in an agile, collaborative environment essential for DevOps to succeed. Mentoring and teaching younger engineers is a crucial part of the senior role. They also advocate for creating a culture of learning and continual improvement across the organization.

The role has moved from hands-on coders to leaders, architects, and change agents. The technical expertise is now applied to high-level systems design and automation strategy. With the experience and wisdom, they guide teams to work together in new ways to fully leverage the promise of DevOps.

Core Competencies for Senior DevOps Engineers

While technical expertise is still important, senior engineers today need competencies in areas like:

Thought Leadership

The engineers should have a vision for how to implement best practices in DevOps and drive digital transformation. They need to be forward-thinking and have the ability to see where opportunities lie for improvement. As thought leaders, they keep up with emerging technologies and methodologies and provide strategic guidance to move teams and processes in the right direction. A senior engineer is not afraid of changes, he is flexible and open minded to choose the right tool or process based on his experience and his knowledge.

Strategic Planning

Rather than focusing solely on tactical execution, engineers now also engage in high-level planning. This involves setting objectives, analyzing the current state, mapping out a transformation roadmap, and determining resource requirements. They understand how to translate business needs into technical solutions. Their plans align DevOps initiatives with wider business goals. Don’t misunderstand the idea, a senior engineer is not the manager but his understanding of the projects give him more information to properly schedule tasks.

Building Effective Teams

Part of strategic planning is building teams with the right structure, skills, and diversity to achieve desired outcomes. Senior engineers exhibit strong leadership abilities in bringing together cross-functional teams. They know how to encourage collaboration between groups by breaking down silos. Engineers also develop talent and create a continuous learning culture. Through coaching and mentoring, they enhance the capabilities of both individuals and teams. Their personal continuous learning path should give guidance to junior people.

Transitioning from Hands-on Work to Leadership

As DevOps engineers gain seniority and experience, their role often transitions from hands-on technical work to more people and process leadership. This requires letting go of previous responsibilities around direct coding, system administration, and implementation. While technical expertise is still important for senior DevOps leaders, the focus shifts towards developing leadership qualities and overseeing the broader DevOps culture and automation pipeline.

Some keys to successfully navigating this transition include:

  • Being willing to delegate tasks that were previously done directly. This requires trust in the abilities of junior staff and a good documentation to share the steps to complete a task.
  • Moving from doing to teaching. Take time to coach and mentor more junior engineers.
  • Focusing on improving team workflows, processes, and collaboration. Especially regarding automation tool that should not be reserved to the DevOps team. It should be understood and used by the entire organization.
  • Architecting automated solutions rather than building them directly.
  • Removing roadblocks and enabling junior staff to be productive and independent.
  • Leading by influence rather than authority. Rely on expertise and example to motivate teams.
  • Maintaining technical knowledge but spending more time on higher-level vision and strategy.
  • Developing soft skills like communication (oral as written), collaboration, persuasion, and emotional intelligence.
  • Thinking long-term and advocating for solutions beyond individual projects.

The transition from hands-on DevOps work to leadership requires a shift in mindset and skills. But talented senior engineers can guide the broader culture while empowering junior staff through coaching and automation. Ultimately, leadership enables multiplying one’s impact across the whole organization.

Creating a Culture of Collaboration

One of the most important responsibilities now is breaking down silos and bringing together groups that have traditionally worked in isolation.

In the past, dev and ops teams often operated in separate spheres with little interaction. Developers would write code and “throw it over the wall” to ops who would then deploy it. This led to tensions as ops struggled with poor quality code that didn’t meet infrastructure needs.

As a senior DevOps engineer, you need to bring these teams together, getting them to collaborate towards shared goals. This involves aligning incentives and helping each group understand how they contribute to business objectives. You should encourage joint ownership of services and push for direct relationships between devs and ops.

Another aspect is facilitating collaboration between security and development teams. Security requirements are often tacked on late in development, leading to friction. As a senior engineer, you need to promote “shifting left” and getting security involved early. Make security a shared responsibility by having devs and security collaborate on designing systems that meet business goals while remaining secure.

Ultimately, silos slow organizations down. Effective senior DevOps leaders break down barriers and nurture understanding between teams. They build connections that enable faster delivery of high-quality services that balance functionality, reliability, and security.

Architecting Automation Pipelines

Building efficient and effective automation pipelines is a key competency for senior DevOps engineers today. With the complexity of modern software delivery, automation is essential to achieving speed, reliability and security. As a senior engineer, you need deep expertise in the tools, frameworks and methodologies to create robust pipelines.

Some key considerations when architecting automation pipelines include:

  • Choosing the right tools and technologies. The options are vast, from open source standards like Jenkins, GitLab CI and GitHub Action to proprietary solutions from AWS, Microsoft and more. Evaluate tradeoffs between flexibility, integrations, ease of use and cost. Adopting a FinOps strategy can demonstrate your level of expertise.
  • Incorporating security practices. Security should be baked into the pipeline. Perform static analysis, dynamic scanning, secret management, credential rotation and more. Integrate security tools and policies at multiple stages. Running regular security audits and promote security issues proactively is a must.
  • Enabling compliance and governance. Build compliance reports, integrate approval gates, and implement access controls. Comply with regulations and organizational policies throughout the pipeline. Having knowledge or expertise in compliance regulations like SOC2, GDPR, etc, is mandatory.
  • Implementing infrastructure as code. Manage all infrastructure, configurations and environments in a Git repo. This enables collaboration, documentation, and reproducibility. Use tools like Terraform, Ansible, FluxCD or ArgoCD.
  • Monitoring and observability. Gain visibility into pipeline health, detect issues early, and continually optimize performance. Incorporate logging, metrics and tracing at all stages. Go further the collection of data by introducing run book automatically applied based on specific patterns.
  • Promoting reliability and resiliency. Implement patterns like progressive rollouts, robust error handling, retries, and graceful degradation. Architect for failure and minimize downtime.

As a senior DevOps engineer, you should stay up-to-date on tools and techniques for building world-class automation pipelines. Mastering these architectures is key to driving efficiency, security and reliability in modern software delivery.

Coaching and Mentoring Junior Staff

“The one exclusive sign of thorough knowledge is the power of teaching.” — Aristotle

As a senior DevOps engineer, an important part of your role is coaching and mentoring more junior staff. This not only helps them grow in their careers, but also strengthens the overall team and your soft skills.

When working with junior engineers, two critical skills are patience and empathy. Keep in mind that concepts you find second nature may be new learning experiences for them. Be understanding when mistakes happen, and focus on constructive feedback. Set aside time for thoughtful answers to their questions.

Explain not just the technical how, but the deeper why behind best practices. Share your insights from past projects about what works well versus common pitfalls to avoid. While junior engineers may be eager to jump into coding, ensure they have a solid architectural understanding beforehand.

Make yourself available for brainstorming ideas with them. Check in regularly on their progress and challenges. Help them develop problem-solving skills they can apply on their own. Celebrate their wins and encourage them when they get discouraged.

Investing time to properly mentor junior staff results in their exponential growth. They gain knowledge and skills much faster with dedicated coaching. You develop future leaders to someday take your place. And you get the satisfaction of helping rising talent advance their careers. The whole team becomes more capable and productive.

Conclusion

In a world that evolve every year with new trends, new technologies, new processes, years of experience are no longer a criterion we can rely on to define a senior level.

It is entirely feasible that you may have had the fortune of working with AWS (established in 2006), Docker (deployed in 2013), or Kubernetes (introduced in 2015) from their inception, based on your past or current experiences. What I’m emphasizing here, is that a professional with 20 years of experience might possess the same level of expertise in these specific technologies as a less experimented engineer whose has started to work on these technologies since there creation. Today, the ability to acquire new knowledge and adaptability to changing situations now holds more importance than the measure of time.

The role of the senior DevOps engineer will continue to evolve as DevOps practices mature. Where senior engineers used to focus on hands-on technical work, they now need skills in leadership, collaboration, coaching, and designing automation architectures.

The core competencies for senior engineers today include:

  • Leading teams and cultivating an agile, collaborative culture
  • Architecting and implementing automation pipelines
  • Mentoring junior staff on technical skills and DevOps thinking
  • Building relationships between development and operations
  • Developing best practices and standards across teams

For engineers looking to progress into senior roles, focus on expanding your leadership and coaching abilities in addition to technical expertise. Learn how to design scalable systems, coach teammates, and build a culture of shared ownership and experimentation.

The future of DevOps relies on senior leaders who can evolve practices and help teams thrive in an environment of continuous delivery and improvement.

About The Author

Nicolas Giron — Staff MLOps — DevOps — Co-Founder Madokai

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