• Brett Petrusek
• September 13, 2023

Navigation

• DevOps Engineer Salary
  • Quick Summary
  • Salary Analysis
  • Base Salary vs Total Compensation
  • Effect of Company and Location
  • Effect of Experience
• Devops Engineer Skills Data
  • Most Requested Skills
  • Highest Paid Skills
  • Full Skills Data Set
• Conclusion

DevOps Engineer Salary

Ever wonder if you are getting paid enough? Ever wonder what skills are in the most demand? This is an ongoing study of the effect of skills and experience on DevOps engineer salary. I want you to use this data to get paid more and remain highly marketable.

Salary and skills data is collected from the most commonly used job posting sites Indeed , ZipRecruiter , and LinkedIn . Levels.fyi is used to supplement senior DevOps engineer salary data, which is often not publicly available or grossly underestimated on job postings. Statistical analysis is performed and a breakdown based on experience level is provided. Job posts are filtered on DevOps engineer positions in the United States that are fully remote.

A quick summary of average salaries , based on years of experience, can be found immediately below. Detailed salary analysis follows, including a statistical breakdown of salary data, total compensation calculations and concepts, FAANG company salary differences, effects of company location on salary, and effects of experience on salary.

Lastly, a detailed analysis of requested skills from public job descriptions is laid out in table format and categorized.

Quick Summary

Here is the basic breakdown of expected DevOps engineer salaries, in the United States, working fully remotely, based on years of experience.

There are a lot of other variables, such as the company and the types of required skills, that contribute to variations in salary. When base salary gets into the $200k range, total compensation starts to include additional forms, such as bonuses, reserve stock units, and other benefits. These variations are discussed in more detail below.

Company size and location have the largest general effect on salary potential, with FAANG companies and those located in the San Francisco and Seattle areas offering the highest salaries.

Culture and process skills have the largest positive effect on salary potential. But there are very few DevOps culture learning programs available for engineers. Land A DevOps Job has a unique DevOps culture learning experience that we offer to the community.

DevOps Engineer Salary Analysis

After scraping all the data from the sources, some basic statistical analysis is performed to find the average, median, mode (most common salary value), and standard deviation.

Let’s break this down a little bit.

The average DevOps engineer salary is $130k and the median is $127k. This means there is a fairly even distribution of salary ranges. You can trust that $130k is a good average salary. It is the bare minimum you should accept if you have more than two years of experience.

The standard deviation is $36k. This means that $166k is the top of the statistically relevant data set. If you have 5+ years of experience as a DevOps engineer, then you should be making $165k.

For DevOps engineers that have 10+ years of experience, you should expect even higher than the standard deviation range of $165k. Of the total number of job postings analyzed, 12.9% are paid above $165k. Within that range, the average salary is about $200k. DevOps engineers with more than 10 years of experience should accept nothing less than $200k in total compensation.

Base Salary vs Total Compensation

When base salary approaches $200k, many companies introduce company equity, commonly referred to as Reserve Stock Units (RSU), if the company is publicy traded. Performance bonuses and/or “profit sharing” are other common forms of compensation. The point is that only base salary is guaranteed and paid out on a monthly/bi-weekly basis. Additional compensation follows a different schedule, also referred to as a “vesting schedule” for RSUs or other stock based performance bonuses. These schedules must be taken into consideration when determining total compensation.

Effect of Company and Location on Salary

Even remote positions are affected by the company and company location. FAANG companies lead the pack with a DevOps engineer salary that is 25% higher than the average. Companies in or around the following cities have a higher average DevOps engineer salary:

* For reference, the national average is $130,827.

Effect of Experience on Salary

Entry Level DevOps Engineer Salary

Salary data for DevOps engineers with less than one year of experience is difficult to measure. Almost all job postings have a one year minimum requirement for experience, and those that do not list experience imply at least one year. About 12% of all the salaries analyzed fall below the (mean - std_dev) line of $94k. This means that even if you have less than one year of DevOps experience, you can still expect a relatively high salary, somewhere in the $80k range.

Certifications, bootcamps, and interview skills (i.e. communication skills) have the largest effect on potential salary for an entry level position. 23% of job postings that require at least one year of experience list certifications as supplemental education.

As you exceed two years of experience, you can expect a relatively high salary starting around $91k. See the skill requirements data below to see a detailed breakdown of all the skills and their effect on salary.

Mid Level DevOps Engineer Salary

DevOps engineers with 5-10 years of experience can expect an average salary of $165k. To secure a mid level position, experience with DevOps cultural philosophy, security, and technical skills are all required.

Job descriptions that have 5-10 years of required experience see a 37% increase in references to cultural and process skills such as Agile, ITIL, and Design Thinking. DevOps engineers that can demonstrate the successful application of these skills on their resume and during the interview process can fetch a higher potential salary.

Senior DevOps Engineer Salary

Analyzing salary data for DevOps engineers with 10+ years of experience is more difficult. Less than 13% of the postings analyzed required 10+ years of experience. When base salary begins to approach $200k, additional compensation such as performance bonuses, profit sharing, and company equity are introduced. This makes comparison difficult and more subjective, based on the needs of the individual.

Combining the public data with Levels.fyi , the average base salary goes up to around $190k. This experience level frequently introduces stock and bonus payments, which takes the total compensation average to $250k.

About 20% of the confirmed positions make more than $300k, with the top 10% making between $400k and $800k. 97% of the jobs in the top 10% of salaries are FAANG or San Franscisco based companies. All of them use stock and bonuses in their total compensation.

Skills Based DevOps Engineer Salary Data

Analysis is performed to determine the request frequency of various technology, cultural, and process skills in DevOps engineer job descriptions. A list of the top requested cultural and tech skills is provided. Lastly, the skills with the highest potential salary (average salary + std deviation) are listed from each category.

Most Requested Skills

Culture and Process Skills

Culture and process skills appear more frequently than any other skill category. The top five skills in this category are Design Thinking, Open Source, Agile, Best Practices, and DevSecOps. Design Thinking and Open Source dominated with 70% and 63% respectively. It is clear that many employers put a heavy emphasis on these skills. The culture skills that had the highest impact on salary potential were Value Stream Mapping, Site Reliability Engineering, and Thought Leadership.

Security Skills

Security and Compliance are two other overlooked skills that score high in frequency tests. Security is mentioned in almost 60% of job descriptions and compliance is mentioned in almost 20%. DevSecOps is becoming much more important to employers, as you can see in the security and compliance skills data section below. More than 15% of companies are asking for DevSecOps specifically. This allows them to reduce their overall security and compliance operational expenditure by baking security into the software development lifecycle and application design processes.

Tech Skills

Following the DevOps Learning Roadmap , we can align the skills data from the job descriptions to determine which skills are being asked for the most. Python and Bash/Shell scripting remain the highest requested programming skills at 21% and 36% respectively. Linux is the favored operating system at 32%. Kubernetes is the most requested container orchestrator, appearing on 52% of job posts. Ansible has become the king of configuration management at 14%. Jenkins remains at the top if CICD and build systems, being mentioned on 13% of job posts. Terraform experience boosts expected salary by over $10k, compared to the average. AWS continues to be the dominant cloud provider being used by businesses, coming in at 51% of the requests. Log analysis with ELK and Splunk is becoming more important to enterprise employers for the DevSecOps reasons we mentioned above.

The most highly requested skills from each category are:

• Config Management: Ansible 14%
• Operating Systems: Linux 32%
• Containerization: Kubernetes 52%
• CICD: Jenkins 13%
• Version Control: Git 14%
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform 20%
• Cloud Platforms: AWS 51%
• Monitoring and Logging: ELK 3%
• Dependency Management: pip (Python) 56%
• Scripting and Programming Languages: Bash 26%, Python 21%
• App Frameworks: .NET 5%
• Databases: AWS RDS 2%
• Artifact Repos: JFrog Artifactory 2%
• Infrastructure Monitoring: Cloudwatch 2%

* The categories not mentioned did not have a statistically relevant skill keyword that was found.

Highest Paid Skills

The skills that have the highest potential salary from each category are:

• Culture and Process: Value Stream Mapping $271k
• Config Management: Puppet $169k
• Operating Systems: Linux $161k
• Containerization: Kubernetes $169k
• CICD: CircleCI $199k
• Version Control: GitLab $170k
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform $168k
• Cloud Platforms: GCP $165k
• Monitoring and Logging: Prometheus $175k
• Dependency Management: pip (Python) $164k
• Scripting and Programming Languages: Golang $171k
• App Frameworks: Ruby on Rails $188k
• Security and Compliance: SonarQube $175k
• Databases: MongoDB $175k
• Artifact Repos: JFrog Artifactory $151k
• Infrastructure Monitoring: Nagios $182k

* The categories not mentioned did not have a statistically relevant skill keyword that was found.

The most specialized or “niche” skills such as Value Stream Mapping, CircleCI, and Nagios that do not have high request frequency have the highest potential salary. The only exception to this is Kubernetes, which is ubiquitous in both potential salary and request frequency.

Full Skills Data Set

Culture and Process

Configuration Management

Operating Systems

Containerization and Orchestration

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD)

Version Control

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Cloud Platforms

Monitoring and Logging

Application Performance Management (APM)

Versioning and Dependency Management

Scripting and Programming Languages

App Frameworks

Security and Compliance

Networking and Load Balancing

Database Management

Artifact Repositories

Collaboration and Project Management

Infrastructure Monitoring

Container Registries

Conclusion

Culture and process skills have the largest positive effect on salary potential. But there are very few DevOps culture learning programs available for engineers. Land A DevOps Job has a unique DevOps culture learning experience that we offer to the community.

This report provides DevOps engineers with the data they need to determine which educational curriculums will yield the highest salaries, increase the likelihood of acquiring a new position based on skill popularity, or simply remain marketable in the DevOps space. I will continue to post monthly updates and archive the previous month for historical purposes. If you have enjoyed this content or wish to provide feedback, please reach out to me at [email protected]