Salary Structure of DevOps Engineer & Architect in the USA

Introduction

DevOps is defined as the philosophy where operations are merged with development to facilitate collaborative changes. Most of the organizations worldwide are adopting DevOps culture and by the end of the year 2018, 40 percent of total global organizations would have adopted DevOps as a mainstream strategy. It opens endless job opportunities for DevOps professionals in various specialized roles like DevOps architects, DevOps engineers, release managers, automation experts etc. In this blog for AWS DevOps Salary, we will majorly focus on DevOps career path, DevOps architect salary and Cloud DevOps Engineer Salary in the USA (Florida, New York, California, Virginia, and more).

DevOps has revolutionized the whole software industry where a single person with restricted skills has been transformed with multidisciplinary skills like configuration, coding, testing, build, infrastructure and release. Since DevOps is not confined to a particular technology, DevOps professionals have the freedom to work continuously, integrate and automate various technologies.

DevOps Engineer & Architect Career Path

DevOps Engineer and Architect salary are among the highest paid IT practitioners today that are growing rapidly. According to the latest report by Puppet Labs, organizations can deploy code up to 30 times faster as compared to other similar technologies with higher success rates. During the last few years, DevOps jobs increased up to 72 percent and demand for DevOps skills had increased up to 55 percent.

Interestingly, most of the Companies consider DevOps skills when hiring IT professionals. Also, the USA witnesses the highest salaries in DevOps as compared to other regions of the world because of the higher adoption rate and the maturity of DevOps development practices.

Devops Professionals Roles And Responsibilities

DevOps professionals are responsible to communicate, collaborate and integrate among software developers and IT operations, most common job responsibilities of DevOps practitioner include faster execution of code and faster deployment so that products or services can be pushed frequently to market and it lowers down the overall failure rate of products and shortens time to recovery when some IT organization experiences a failure. The complex responsibilities of the professionals justify their salaries that vary between $110,000 to $192,000 per year.

Do you know that most of the DevOps engineers or architects are appointed in the media or entertainment sector and only a few of them are hired for the education sector? It signifies that the media or entertainment sector have already realized the significance of IT techniques whereas the education sector still needs to realize the importance of DevOps.

Another interesting fact is that most of the DevOps engineers are hired for USA projects in NY, Florida, California, Virginia, and more. The presence of Silicon Valley in California where most of the leading It companies are located gives an extra advantage when it comes to DevOps adoption.

According to PuppetLabs, DevOps architects or engineers enjoy the highest average salaries due to fast adoption and their economy contexts. If we talk about India, then the scope is obviously good but the salary is low as compared to the US or Western Europe due to slower adoption of new IT techniques and economic contexts.

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Which job title is most valuable?

According to research, the DevOps technology includes a variety of job titles and not all of them are created equal. Despite the validity of job titles itself and their job responsibilities, DevOps engineers and architects enjoy the highest salaries among all. Further, 48 percent of total DevOps engineers earn at least $110K per annum instead of their job titles, roles or responsibilities. If you also wanted to earn a 6 figures annual salary then DevOps is the right career choice for every individual seeking a successful career in the IT sector. Before we go into deep, this is necessary to discuss who is DevOps engineer and its roles, responsibilities.

Who is DevOps Engineer?

He is the person who not only has years of experience in DevOps but also has in-depth knowledge of various IT domains. Keep in mind that there are no special prerequisites to become a successful DevOps professional, you just need to have the right knowledge and skills for becoming a DevOps Engineer or Architect.

DevOps engineers are usually interested in coding, scripting, infrastructure, network operations, deployment, etc. Interestingly, these are the people who have been pushed beyond their technical competencies and have a more holistic view of DevOps environments. Let us have a quick look at the attributes that a  DevOps engineer must possess: –

• He must be able to use a variety of automation tools, open-source technologies as required by the business.
• He must code, script and relevant experience in network operations too.
• He needs to be comfortable with frequent code testing, incremental coding, and the faster deployment of products.
• His data management skills must be overwhelming and need to be completely focused on attractive business outcomes.
• He must be comfortable with collaboration, communication, and reaching across functional borders.

Why Do Companies Need a DevOps Engineer or Architect?

Based on current market trends, DevOps is the most popular automation framework that is required to accelerate product deployments. With the automation tools, work is automatically done in the background and the team can move faster by focusing on functional activities. Obviously, you can hire freelancers to manage the costs but this is only a temporary solution.

Here, the role of DevOps engineers and architects comes into the frame. He makes sure that the system is running smoothly and issues are resolved quickly as soon as it arises. He also makes sure that developers never do the repetitive tasks and infrastructure is still up to data as required. As the Company expands, DevOps engineers also automate to accelerate the workflows. This is DevOps only that allows developers to focus on core activities so that products can be delivered more reliably and faster.

DevOps Engineer Skills & Responsibilities

Let us check out the skills required to be hired by top leading Companies and enjoy attractive salary packages as defined below.

DevOps Engineer Key Responsibilities:

• Design, build or maintain IT infrastructure to deliver the most impactful cloud services.
• Design or build or automated test cases to validate the code in the pipeline.
• Working closely with the software development team to make sure that solutions have been designed based on customer needs and requirements with scalability and operability in mind.

DevOps Engineer Skills

• Bachelors in any IT program
• Experience in Python or scripting languages would be an added advantage.
• Experience in developing or maintaining infrastructure or open-source technologies.
• Experience in Linux programming or bash scripting.
• Hands-on experience with different configuration tools.
• Experience in building or maintaining virtual machines or containers.
• Experience in maintaining cloud-based solutions like Azure.

Cloud DevOps Engineer Salary by Company

Here, we have given the salaries of DevOps professionals that have been categorized based on Companies. Amazon witnesses the highest salary for AWS DevOps engineers and architects in the modern technical marketplace.

Here are the exact salaries in figures offered by top employers to DevOps engineers Worldwide.

Amazon	$119K
IBM	$96K
Booz, Allen, and Hamilton	$92K
Capital One Financial Corp	$117K
Trimble Navigation, Ltd	$105K
Deloitte	$85K
CGI Federal	$82K
Accenture	$97K

Average Salary of DevOps Engineer & Architect

The average salary for a DevOps engineer in the USA is $164,800 and the average salary of a DevOps architect in the USA is between $140,000 to $190,000.

Read: DevOps Engineer Job Description - Role & Responsibilities

A million profiles were examined to give an accurate salary estimate for DevOps professionals in the USA. However, the national average may reduce up to $48,000 if you consider other countries like India or more.

A senior DevOps engineer is expected to earn $133 K per year as per the ZipRecruiter. Here is the clear salary breakup for your reference based on different parameters.

DevOps Engineer Salary by experience

The average salaries of DevOps professionals based on skills in the USA (Florida, New York, California, Virginia, and more). 

An entry-level DevOps engineer is expected to earn $73K per year and this figure keeps on increasing as you grow up in your career. Here is the clear graph with salaries how much you can earn based on your experience. 

DevOps Engineer Salary Growth

DevOps growth structure of (Florida, New York, California, Virginia, and more) during last few years that has been changed dramatically by the end of 2017.

DevOps Scales out creating demand for professionals

The data confirms the strong demand of DevOps engineers as the adoption of technology increases by leading global organizations worldwide. Today, DevOps can be seen anywhere across industries like media, entertainment, IT, education, healthcare, real estate, government organizations, etc.

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The DevOps adoption by leading enterprises is continued so the demand for DevOps practitioners too that drives up salaries ultimately. At the same time, they tend to have more responsibilities as discussed earlier as compared to the developer or network engineer, so this is another reason why DevOps has the highest salary packages as compared to other IT professionals.

DevOps has forced organizations to be more responsive and remain competitive that leads to the total ROI of the business. Additionally, DevOps has improved the total product life cycle of the Company by adopting the best technical practices that lead to having faster product deliveries and maximum quality.

Interestingly, high-performing organizations are able to deploy almost 200 times faster as compared to the low-performing organizations. Their lead time is 2000 times faster and recovery is also accelerated when an organization faces some failure. In brief, DevOps is changing the culture of how business operations were performed earlier and how they are performed today.

Final Words:

DevOps engineers and DevOps architects are high in demand with attractive salary structure annually. According to research and the average DevOps Engineer salary survey this year, hiring, retaining, and managing the DevOps resources is the biggest priority for the businesses than ever.

DevOps resources are high in demand and the accompanying higher AWS DevOps Salary discussed throughout the blog proves it. The data shows that Companies are pleased to invest in the resources having skills and talent that can make IT strong and competitive.