There’s no such thing as a “DevOps” engineer

There’s a better title

Introduction

Okay, so there are DevOps Engineers, but the title is misleading and in theory, it shouldn’t be used.

DevOps is not any one person’s responsibility. It’s in the name itself. It is the continual goal to improve the processes between developers and operators. It often feels like giving someone that title puts the onus of DevOps practices on that one person, instead of sharing the responsibility across all engineers.

To suggest someone is purely a DevOps engineer, almost seems to imply they are an Agile coach or something similar. As in, they don’t do any coding, they just push people into better DevOps practices.

But in reality, DevOps engineers are always operators who do code. So why use the term DevOps? Well, probably because it’s confusing as to what operators do in the first place and using a vague term for someone who’s responsibilities are vague seems to line up.

So in this blog post, I’m going to talk about the many jobs a DevOps engineer can do, the corresponding titles, and land on what I think should be the actual title.

Titles

Pipeline Engineer

I’ve never seen anyone actually use this term, though I feel it could certainly be one. DevOps engineers spend a lot of time building and configuring the pipelines that automate the build, test, and deployment jobs for an application.

I think the work is sufficient enough that you could hire someone dedicated to working on just these tasks alone. Especially when you dive into the myriad of security and performance jobs that can be added.

You could also use the titles CI Engineer, CD Engineer, or CI/CD Engineer. Those would probably be clearer as a Pipeline Engineer sounds like a job in Oil & Gas.

Cloud Engineer

In a sense, DevOps engineers provision, configure, and maintain infrastructure, networks, and databases. So, you might be tempted to use titles like:

• Infrastructure Engineer
• Network Engineer
• Database Administrator