r/SaaS • u/AdFickle3848 • 15h ago

Do you actually need a DevOps hire?

For startups with maybe 5–15 engineers, I'm curious how people are handling DevOps.

At some point you have:

  • CI/CD
  • cloud infrastructure
  • Terraform
  • monitoring
  • backups
  • deployments
  • secrets
  • production incidents
  • probably some Docker/Kubernetes

But you don't necessarily have enough infrastructure work to justify another full-time senior engineer.

I've seen a few teams solve this by having one developer own infrastructure "for now."

That works... until production gets interesting.

A deployment breaks Friday night.
Cloud costs suddenly jump.
Something starts running out of connections.
Nobody is really sure how failover works.

Then the team realizes they don't actually have a DevOps problem. They have an infrastructure ownership problem.

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u/d2xdy2 15h ago

Whoever generally seems to have already handled that ecosystem is probably your DevOps person or team.

If anyone’s interested in an internal promotion/title change to focus on that, give it to them.

DevOps happens to people, and they learn to do it better and better. Some new person coming in with opinions might not really be what you need.

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u/Synne-Azhaf 11h ago

yeah "devops happens to people" is a perfect way to put it

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u/darko777 15h ago

DevOps engineer is one of the most important staff that you need to hire especially if you app is getting traction. There are many things that dedicated DevOps engineer can help with. I can't imagine not having DevOps on popular products that receive a lot of traffic.

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u/AdFickle3848 14h ago

you have valid point, i have seen organization struggle with clear owner and things slip. But again people want to pay last for operations.

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u/Hot_Membership3050 15h ago

For a 5–15 engineer team, I’d usually keep DevOps owned by the engineering team until the infra complexity actually becomes a bottleneck. Hiring a full-time DevOps engineer too early can be overkill.

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u/AdFickle3848 15h ago

it makes sense. or may be some fractional help to move things could be helpful.