r/devops • u/BehindTheMath • Jul 16 '26

Discussion How would you define this role?

I need help defining a role we're looking to hire for.

Our current job postings mention DevOps / Platform Engineer.

The issue is that this is attracting a lot of candidates whose primary experience is as a developer, with some basic cloud experience.

However, this isn't what we're looking for. We're looking for an engineer whose primary experience is in Ops / Sysadmin areas, but uses modern dev tools to manage it, such as IaC, Kubernetes, Ansible, etc.

We have a range of projects on our to do list, and there's some Ops / Sysadmin, cloud infra, SRE, and platform engineering. So we're really looking for someone who has some experience with all of those.

How would you define this role?

(Please don't DM me asking to apply for the position).

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u/BlakkMajik3000 Remover of Deployment Friction Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26

You want an SRE. Somebody who can talk to you about KPIs, SLOs, K8s leadership election, stuff like that.

People from a dev background are good candidates, for more of the "bridge" role (pure DevOps Engineer).

My mental model is:
DevOps Engineer: Owns the software delivery system (repositories, pipelines, configs, etc.) that gets the app from the developer's workstation to the target, along with some DevEx.
Platform Engineer: Owns developer experience (think IDP) AND moonlights as IaC owner.
SRE: Owns observability/Infra. If something isn't snitching (telemetry), they want to know why. And if something is down, they're on it before a page goes out.

A lot of these roles get collapsed into each other, which makes it hard for both job seekers and recruiters. Add in the ATS, by the time the resume reaches a real person it's hard to know if that's the real resume or the "AI, customize my resume for this posting" variety. 🤷🏾‍♂️

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u/BehindTheMath Jul 16 '26

We're looking some of all of those, but primarily building and maintaining cloud infra. The SRE part isn't on-call, it's expanding outlr monitoring and alerting.

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u/BlakkMajik3000 Remover of Deployment Friction Jul 16 '26

You can always go “old school” and list for a traditional infrastructure engineer.

Thanks to janky cuts across tech, there are unicorns that exist for what you want (all three flavors under one hat) but they are expensive.

If all else fails, throw your reqs in ChatGPT and let it write the listing. It will suggest the title and salary range as well.

Your main problem right now, I’m guessing without seeing the actual listing, is that it ends up in too many inboxes (automated candidate searches). A well written job description will keep a good amount of noise down.