DevOps professionals continue to be in demand, with DevOps engineer remaining one of the hardest to staff positions in tech, according to the Robert Half Technology Salary Guide for 2019.
For CIOs, that may mean paying a premium to find or keep these in-demand professionals. However, according to recent numbers from Foote Partners’ 2019 IT Professional Salary Survey, 2019 base DevOps salaries appear to be fairly flat compared to last year. “What’s happening now is that salaries are stabilizing,” says Bill Reynolds, a spokesman for Foote Partners, which conducts IT salary and skills pay market intelligence for the U.S. and Canada. “DevOps adoption is now fairly guaranteed, so those big spikes in pay we saw in the past have leveled off.”
Nonetheless, DevOps professionals – particularly senior engineers with experience – remain a hot commodity. According to the DevOps Institute’s "Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report 2019,” 39 percent of respondents around the globe were recruiting for the DevOps Engineer/Manager title. Behind that were Software Engineer (29 percent), DevOps Consultant (22 percent), Test Engineer (18 percent), Automation Architect (17 percent), Infrastructure Engineer (16 percent), and CI/CD Engineer (16 percent).
[ Read also: The great “DevOps engineer” title debate. ]
We rounded up 10 noteworthy numbers (and then some) that should help, whether you’re on the hunt for a DevOps job or trying to fill one.
DevOps salaries by the numbers
#5: DevOps Engineer role’s ranking among all tech salaries, according to Dice’s 2019 Tech Salary Report.
Average DevOps Engineer annual salary: $111,683: That puts DevOps Engineer just behind Tech Management (CEO, CIO, CTO, VP, Dir.), Systems Architect, Strategist/Architect, and Product Management and ahead of Software Engineer, Hardware Engineer, and Project Manager. It’s the first time that the title of DevOps Engineer has appeared in the top five, according to Dice.
#1: Pay ranking DevOps of all developer roles in the U.S., according to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, followed by data scientists, backend developers, mobile developers, and game or graphics developers. DevOps specialists were also the biggest earners in the U.K., Germany, and India.
$10,000: The difference in median pay for a DevOps professional in San Francisco with a bachelor’s degree and five years of experience ($116,000) versus a desktop developer with the same background ($106,000), according to the StackOverflow Salary Calculator.
$133,002: average annual salary for Lead DevOps engineers (with seven years or more of experience), based on analysis across 65 U.S. cities by Foote Partners. Senior DevOps engineers (five years or more experience) are making $115,486. And mid-level DevOps engineers are taking home $102,233. These salary figures are relatively flat compared to the same period in 2018, according to Foote Partners.
15 percent: The median base salary premium employers are awarding for non-certified DevOps skills, according to Foote Partners. That number has held steady over the past year, but is down 6 percent from 2018.
DevOps ranks 7th among the hardest-to-staff positions in tech, according to the Robert Half Technology 2019 Salary Guide, which calculates the median salary of a DevOps engineer as $110,000.
119,654: The number of open positions returned from a worldwide jobs search for “DevOps” on LinkedIn: That’s more than twice as many as a year ago.
43,679: The number of job listings produced by a recent U.S. jobs search for the term “DevOps” on Glassdoor, which also ranked DevOps Engineer among the top 10 notable tech roles in demand for 2019.
DevOps engineer checks in at number six on Glassdoor’s 50 best jobs in America list for 2019.
[ Get our free eBooks: DevOps Hiring: The Ultimate Guide and IT job searching in 2019: A practical guide. ]
