DevOps Engineer
What the work is
Facilitates and undertakes communication, collaboration, integration and automation to improve efficiency and workflow across different specialist IT teams.
Would you enjoy the work?
These are the main tasks in the official description. Mark how each one sounds to you.
- Leads and coordinates software development and operations, including continuous integration, continuous delivery, code deployment and system automation
- Promotes collaboration between development teams and operations teams
- Deploys applications or updates systems to ensure uniformity between networks, servers and automation elements within a given environment
- Automates software and infrastructure deployment using automation tools to improve the software development life cycle
- Implements and manages containerisation technologies
- Conducts performance testing and tuning to optimise the performance and stability of operational infrastructure
- Automates security testing and vulnerability scanning across the entire software development lifecycle
Try it
A simulation and a case study from this kind of work, set in a product team at a fictional online grocery delivery company, with developers, a designer and a product manager. They are fictional.
The kind of days you could have
Good days
- You solve a problem that had the whole team stuck, and you wrote less code than anyone expected
- A release goes out smoothly and the customers never know it happened
- A newer colleague you helped writes their first good piece of code
Hard days
- The site slows down at the worst possible moment, on the busiest night of the week
- A feature everyone wanted is built, and then nobody wants to use it
- Code you wrote two years ago turns out to be the cause of a bug today
Written by Career Calling as a general guide. Real roles vary by employer and place.
Work a mission
Step into a simulated workplace in this field, with a brief from your manager.
Description and tasks: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Occupation Standard Classification for Australia, 2024, Version 1.0 (opens another site), occupation 273332, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. The skill guide above is our plain English summary.