DevOps Engineer, SRE or Platform Engineer? Getting the Job Title Right

"DevOps" appears in a large number of job adverts, but it doesn't mean the same thing everywhere. In one organisation the title may describe infrastructure automation, while in another it's closer to SRE, release engineering, cloud operations or platform product ownership. Get it wrong and you'll attract the wrong candidates, or lose the right ones.

The main roles

DevOps engineer: builds and maintains the pipelines and tooling that move code from development to production. Expect continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), automation, infrastructure as code and monitoring.

Site reliability engineer (SRE): focuses on keeping systems reliable and performant at scale. SREs often define service level objectives, manage incident response, reduce manual work through automation and apply software engineering to operations problems.

Platform engineer: builds the internal platforms and tools that other developers use, such as self-service environments, standardised deployment paths and shared infrastructure. The aim is to make developers faster and reduce friction.

Cloud engineer: designs, builds and manages infrastructure on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, covering networking, storage, security, cost and resilience.

DevSecOps engineer: embeds security into the delivery pipeline, from code scanning and secrets management to compliance automation. In practice these roles overlap heavily, and small companies often expect one person to cover several of them.In practice these roles overlap heavily, and small companies often expect one person to cover several of them.

For employers: how to write a better advert

• Describe the work, not just the title. State whether the role is about building pipelines, running production systems, supporting developers or all three.
• Be specific about the stack. Name your cloud provider(s), orchestration tools, infrastructure-as-code tooling and monitoring platforms.
• Be honest about on-call. Out-of-hours support is a big factor for candidates, so include the rota and any additional pay.
• Separate essential from desirable. Long wish-lists put off strong candidates.

For candidates: how to read an advert

Look past the title. Read the responsibilities carefully, especially where the advert mentions Kubernetes, Terraform, observability, developer experience or production support. Those details tell you what your day-to-day would actually involve. Ask in your first conversation whether the role is mainly building, operating or enabling other engineers, and what the balance looks like.

Not sure which role you need? TPNTECH Recruitment can help you define the brief and find the right engineer. Get in touch for a chat.