Hire DevOps & SRE Engineers

Why Hiring DevOps & SRE Engineers Is Uniquely Challenging

DevOps and SRE roles blend software engineering with infrastructure operations in ways that make them exceptionally hard to hire for. These engineers need to write production-quality code, design resilient systems, automate complex workflows, and respond to incidents under pressure — all while maintaining the cultural mindset that breaks down silos between development and operations teams.

The title "DevOps engineer" has become one of the most overloaded in tech. Candidates range from sysadmins who learned to write Bash scripts to software engineers who configured a Jenkins pipeline once. Without deep technical vetting, you risk hiring someone who can talk about CI/CD in theory but struggles to build a reliable deployment pipeline that handles rollbacks, canary deployments, and multi-environment promotion.

Exodata's engineers evaluate DevOps and SRE candidates the way your team would — through scenario-based assessments that test incident response thinking, infrastructure automation depth, and the ability to design systems that meet real SLO targets. We look for engineers who understand that reliability is a feature, not an afterthought.

What Our Engineers Assess

Every DevOps and SRE candidate goes through a live technical assessment with our engineering team. Here's what we evaluate:

• CI/CD pipeline design — build automation, testing strategies, deployment patterns (blue-green, canary, rolling), and rollback mechanisms
• Container orchestration — Kubernetes architecture, Helm charts, service meshes, pod scheduling, and resource management
• Infrastructure as Code — Terraform, Ansible, or Pulumi for managing complex, multi-environment infrastructure
• Observability and monitoring — metrics, logging, tracing, alerting strategies, and SLO/SLI/error budget management
• Incident response — on-call practices, runbook development, post-mortem culture, and mean-time-to-recovery optimization
• System reliability design — fault tolerance patterns, chaos engineering principles, capacity planning, and load management

Common Tech Stacks We Vet For

Engagement Options