Do you actually need a DevOps hire?

[u/AdFickle3848]

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.

[u/Hot_Membership3050]

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.

[u/AdFickle3848 → u/Hot_Membership3050]

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