DevOps, SRE & Cloud Engineer Market September 2022
Cloud/DevOps/SRE Engineers continue to be in high demand in the Dublin market as organisations enjoy the flexibility/reduced costs of a cloud-first model. Naturally, the three dominant cloud providers are AWS, Azure and GCP.
The core skill sets that organisations in this space include CICD best practices, Infrastructure as code (Terraform) and Kubernetes. An A-player in this space would also have development experience with a language such as Python (ideally programming). Over the past 6 months, SREs have become increasingly popular. SREs are seen to complement the DevOps team as opposed to replacing it.
Salaries in this space have experienced a slight increase over the past 6 months. As more companies look to migrate from on-premise to the cloud the demand for engineers continues to increase and hence the salary they are requiring. However, there is also an increase in supply for these engineers as system administrators and software developers start to transition their careers towards SRE/DevOps/Cloud.
Companies that are prominent in this sector are financial companies and SAAS platforms. Financial sector companies tend to be at an earlier stage of their cloud journey and would be typically migrating from on-premise. The SAAS companies are eager to make their product accessible to as many customers globally as possible and therefore look to host their products via public clouds such as AWS and Azure.
A key motivating factor for candidates in this space is the technology stack and greenfield projects. New technologies such as Kubernetes/ Terraform are very interesting for people looking to advance their careers in this space.
Candidates are very interested in being in a production-facing environment, building out infrastructure using the latest tech. Greenfield environments are also super exciting as it gives the engineers a chance to shape a cloud footprint.
Clients are seeking ambitious engineers who are eager to develop and willing to take on extra responsibilities such as leading specialised projects. Being a strong communicator is key as they must collaborate with architects, developers and business stakeholders. Any candidate with development experiences, such as programming and scripting, is very much sought after (especially programming).
As this space is relatively new, there are a lot of areas for engineers to upskill and develop. A really exciting benefit that engineers will seek is an education allowance for courses and certifications. Certified courses for AWS, Azure and Kubernetes are very appealing for candidates as many of them are eager to become a master of their craft.
In terms of trends, there are a large number of system administrators seeking to transition to DevOps practices. In the DevOps space, clients are excited about meeting candidates with a development-first approach. Companies love candidates who can come in and build immediately. Another trend is that companies are becoming more cloud agnostic – using multiple cloud providers.