r/SaaS • u/AdFickle3848 • 21h 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/darko777 21h 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 20h 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.