DevOps engineers are among the hardest technical roles to fill. The combination of deep systems knowledge, automation expertise, cloud platform fluency, and cross-functional collaboration skills creates a candidate profile that is in enormous demand and relatively short supply. When you open a DevOps requisition, the clock starts ticking — and every week that role sits unfilled costs your organization in delayed projects, overworked existing staff, and lost momentum.
So how long should it actually take? And more importantly, what can you do to accelerate the process without sacrificing candidate quality?
Industry Benchmarks: Where Most Companies Stand
Based on industry data from LinkedIn, SHRM, and technical recruiting surveys, here are the current benchmarks for DevOps and related infrastructure roles:
| Role | Average Time-to-Hire | Top Quartile |
|---|---|---|
| Junior DevOps Engineer | 30-40 days | 18-25 days |
| Mid-Level DevOps Engineer | 45-55 days | 25-35 days |
| Senior DevOps / SRE | 50-65 days | 30-40 days |
| DevOps Manager / Lead | 55-70 days | 35-45 days |
| Cloud / Platform Architect | 60-80 days | 40-50 days |
The gap between average and top quartile is significant — 15-30 days in most cases. That gap represents the difference between a standard hiring process and an optimized one. It is not about cutting corners. It is about eliminating waste.
For context, the overall average time-to-hire across all roles is approximately 36 days. DevOps roles consistently run 30-80% longer than this baseline, reflecting both the scarcity of talent and the complexity of evaluation.
What Slows Down DevOps Hiring
Understanding the bottlenecks in your hiring timeline is the first step toward fixing them. Most delays fall into a few common categories.
Slow Initial Screening
The single largest time sink in most hiring processes is the gap between receiving applications and conducting the first substantive evaluation. Many organizations take 1-3 weeks just to review resumes and schedule initial screens. During this window, the best candidates are interviewing elsewhere — and often accepting offers.
The problem is compounded by the limitations of traditional resume screening for technical roles. Non-technical recruiters spend time reviewing candidates they cannot effectively evaluate, creating a bottleneck that delays qualified candidates while allowing unqualified ones through.
Too Many Interview Rounds
A typical enterprise hiring process for a DevOps engineer might look like this:
- Recruiter phone screen (Week 1)
- Hiring manager phone screen (Week 2)
- Technical phone screen (Week 3)
- Take-home assessment (Week 3-4)
- On-site panel interviews — 4-5 separate sessions (Week 5)
- Reference checks (Week 6)
- Offer approval and extension (Week 6-7)
Seven steps across 7 weeks. Each step requires scheduling coordination, which adds buffer time. Each handoff between steps is an opportunity for the candidate to lose momentum or accept a competing offer.
The companies filling DevOps roles fastest are completing their process in 3-4 steps across 2-3 weeks.
Misaligned Job Requirements
Unrealistic job descriptions are a significant but often invisible drag on time-to-hire. When a job posting requires “5+ years of Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, Python, Go, AWS, Azure, GCP, and Jenkins” — technologies that span multiple domains and evolve rapidly — the candidate pool shrinks to near zero.
The result: weeks of searching for a unicorn who doesn’t exist, followed by a recalibration of requirements and a restart of the search. This cycle can add 4-8 weeks to the overall timeline.
Slow Decision-Making
After final interviews, many organizations take 1-2 weeks to make a decision due to scheduling conflicts among decision-makers, internal deliberation, and approval processes. For DevOps candidates who are evaluating 3-5 opportunities simultaneously, this delay is often fatal to the offer. The candidate accepts a faster-moving company’s offer while you are still in committee.
Competition for Talent
The market reality is stark. The demand for DevOps and SRE talent continues to outpace supply. Qualified DevOps engineers receive multiple recruiter contacts per week, and passive candidates (those not actively looking) represent the majority of the talent pool. In this environment, speed is a competitive advantage. The organization that moves fastest gets the hire.
The Cost of Extended Vacancies
Every day a DevOps role sits unfilled has real financial consequences that compound over time.
Direct Productivity Loss
A vacant DevOps role means that the work that role was supposed to handle either doesn’t get done or falls on the rest of the team. For a team of 4 DevOps engineers that loses a member, the remaining 3 are now operating at 75% capacity (or at 100% capacity with increasing burnout and declining quality).
If the team was already at capacity — which is the reason you opened the requisition in the first place — the vacancy creates a growing backlog of infrastructure work, security patches, deployment pipeline improvements, and automation projects.
Project Delays
Cloud infrastructure projects, platform migrations, and deployment automation initiatives depend on having the right engineers in place. A 60-day vacancy on a critical hire can delay an entire project by 90+ days once you account for onboarding and ramp-up time for the eventual hire.
Burnout and Turnover Risk
Extended vacancies increase the workload on remaining team members. Over weeks and months, this sustained overload leads to burnout, reduced quality, and — in the worst case — additional departures. Losing a second team member because you couldn’t fill the first vacancy creates a cascade that can take 6-12 months to recover from.
Quantifying the Cost
A rough cost model for an unfilled mid-level DevOps position:
| Cost Category | Weekly Cost |
|---|---|
| Lost productivity (salary equivalent) | $2,700 |
| Overtime/contractor coverage | $1,500 - $3,000 |
| Project delay impact (varies widely) | $2,000 - $10,000 |
| Burnout risk (probability-weighted) | $500 - $1,500 |
| Estimated weekly cost of vacancy | $6,700 - $17,200 |
Over a 60-day vacancy, that adds up to $57,000-$148,000 in total impact. This is why speed matters — not for its own sake, but because delay is expensive.
Strategies to Reduce Time-to-Hire
Here are the specific tactics that top-performing organizations use to fill DevOps roles 2-3x faster than average.
Pre-Vetted Candidate Pipelines
The fastest way to reduce time-to-hire is to have qualified candidates ready before you need them. Working with a technical recruiting partner that maintains a pipeline of pre-vetted DevOps engineers means you can start with candidates who have already been technically evaluated, rather than beginning from scratch every time you open a requisition.
At Exodata, our engineer-led vetting process means that when a client needs a DevOps engineer, we can present technically validated candidates within days rather than weeks. The candidates have already been assessed by an engineer with hands-on DevOps experience, so the client’s team can skip straight to the team-fit and role-specific evaluation.
Compress Your Interview Process
Reduce the number of steps and run them in parallel wherever possible:
- Combine the recruiter and hiring manager screen into one call. A joint 45-minute conversation replaces two separate 30-minute calls and eliminates a week of scheduling overhead.
- Run technical assessment and team interviews in the same day. If the technical assessment is a live exercise (pair programming, system design discussion), schedule it back-to-back with team interviews on a single visit or video call block.
- Make decisions within 48 hours of the final interview. Pre-align your decision-makers on evaluation criteria so the debrief can happen quickly. If a decision-maker is unavailable, empower a proxy.
Write Realistic Job Descriptions
Be honest about what the role actually requires versus what would be nice to have. A DevOps engineer who is strong in Terraform and Azure but has never used Ansible can learn Ansible in a few weeks. Rejecting that candidate because your job description requires Ansible is an expensive mistake.
Separate your requirements into three tiers:
- Required (day 1): The skills the candidate must have to be productive immediately
- Expected (first 90 days): Skills the candidate should develop during onboarding, with support
- Preferred (nice to have): Skills that would be a bonus but are not essential
This framework expands your candidate pool without lowering your quality bar.
Sell the Opportunity Early
Don’t wait until the offer stage to make the case for why a candidate should join your team. From the first interaction, communicate what makes the role compelling:
- What will the engineer build or transform?
- What technologies and tools will they work with?
- What does the team look like and how does it collaborate?
- What is the growth trajectory for the role?
- What is the compensation range?
Engineers are evaluating you as much as you are evaluating them. Companies that articulate a compelling opportunity at every stage of the process close offers faster and at higher rates.
Streamline Offer Approval
If your offer approval process requires multiple signatures, budget reviews, and executive sign-off, work with your leadership to pre-approve compensation bands for open requisitions. This allows hiring managers to extend offers within 24 hours of a hire decision, rather than waiting days for approvals.
Use Contract-to-Hire as an Accelerator
For organizations that struggle with long decision-making cycles, contract-to-hire can be a strategic accelerator. The lower commitment threshold means faster internal approval, and the contract period serves as a working evaluation that provides better signal than any interview process.
Building a Continuous Recruiting Pipeline
The most effective long-term strategy for fast DevOps hiring is to shift from reactive recruiting (opening a search when a vacancy occurs) to continuous pipeline building (maintaining relationships with qualified candidates at all times).
Ongoing Sourcing
Don’t stop sourcing when your current roles are filled. Maintain a shortlist of qualified candidates who expressed interest but were not needed at the time. When a new vacancy opens, your first outreach is to warm candidates, not cold ones.
Employer Brand Investment
Your company’s reputation in the DevOps and engineering community directly affects how quickly you can fill roles. Engineers talk to each other. Organizations known for interesting technical challenges, good management, and competitive compensation attract inbound interest. Those known for bureaucratic hiring processes and poor engineering culture struggle regardless of how aggressively they source.
Contributing to open-source projects, publishing technical blog posts, and presenting at meetups and conferences all build the employer brand that makes recruiting easier over time. Learn about how Exodata approaches DevOps and infrastructure work to see what compelling engineering narratives look like.
Relationship with Recruiting Partners
A strong relationship with a technical recruiting firm means they understand your tech stack, culture, and hiring standards without a lengthy briefing every time you open a new role. This institutional knowledge translates directly into faster candidate delivery and better match quality.
FAQ
What is the average time-to-hire for DevOps engineers in 2026? The average time-to-hire for DevOps engineers is 45-60 days, depending on seniority and specialization. Senior DevOps and SRE roles trend toward the higher end (50-65 days), while junior roles average 30-40 days. Organizations with optimized hiring processes and pre-vetted candidate pipelines consistently achieve 25-35 days for mid-level roles, roughly half the industry average.
Why are DevOps roles harder to fill than other engineering positions? DevOps engineers require a rare combination of skills that spans multiple technical domains: systems administration, networking, automation/scripting, CI/CD tooling, cloud platforms, containerization, and monitoring. This breadth of requirement, combined with strong demand from nearly every industry, creates a supply-demand imbalance that is more pronounced than for most other engineering specializations. Additionally, the rapid evolution of DevOps tooling means that candidates’ skills must be current, further narrowing the qualified pool.
How much does an unfilled DevOps position cost per week? The total cost of an unfilled DevOps position is estimated at $6,700-$17,200 per week when accounting for lost productivity, overtime or contractor costs to cover essential work, project delay impact, and increased burnout risk for remaining team members. The actual figure varies significantly based on your team size, current project load, and the criticality of the vacancy. Over a 60-day vacancy, the total cost typically falls in the $57,000-$148,000 range.
Should we lower our hiring bar to fill DevOps roles faster? No. Lowering your quality bar to fill roles faster trades a short-term problem (vacancy cost) for a much larger long-term problem (bad-hire cost). Instead, focus on expanding your candidate pool by writing realistic job descriptions, considering candidates from adjacent backgrounds who can ramp up quickly, and using pre-vetted pipelines from technical recruiting partners. You can fill roles faster without lowering quality by eliminating process waste rather than evaluation rigor.
What is the single most effective way to reduce DevOps time-to-hire? Starting with pre-vetted candidates. If a technical recruiting partner has already evaluated a candidate’s hands-on DevOps skills before presenting them, your team can skip the initial screening and technical phone screen — which typically consume 2-3 weeks of the hiring timeline. Combined with a compressed 2-3 step interview process and fast decision-making, this approach can cut total time-to-hire from 50-60 days to 20-30 days without sacrificing candidate quality.