| Detail | For this role |
|---|---|
| Department | Information Technology |
| Level | Manager |
| Reports to | Head of Engineering |
| Direct reports | DevOps Engineer, Senior DevOps Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer, Build and Release Engineer |
| Experience | 10 to 14 years in systems, DevOps or SRE work, with 3 or more years managing a DevOps team |
DevOps Manager job description template
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Job title: DevOps Manager
Department: Information Technology
Reports to: Head of Engineering
Location: [City], [office, branch or site]
About the role
A DevOps Manager leads the team that builds and runs the delivery platform: CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, environments, monitoring and release processes. They decide how code moves from a developer's laptop to production, how infrastructure is provisioned and how platform incidents are handled on call. In Indian product companies, startups and IT services firms the role usually reports to the head of engineering. A good DevOps Manager makes releases routine and safe, keeps cloud costs in check and gives developers self-service instead of tickets.
Key responsibilities
- Set the DevOps roadmap for CI/CD, infrastructure as code, environments, observability and developer self-service.
- Standardize build and deployment pipelines so every service follows the same stages, quality gates and approvals.
- Plan the on-call rota for the platform team, and run incident response and postmortems for platform failures.
- Own cloud cost for engineering environments, review spend weekly and remove idle or oversized resources.
- Approve infrastructure changes with a wide blast radius, such as network, database or cluster upgrades.
- Build secrets management, image scanning and access controls into the platform together with the security team.
- Track deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate and time to restore, and act on the trends.
- Plan capacity for peak events such as sale days or festival season, and run load tests with product teams.
- Hire, coach and cross-train DevOps engineers so no platform component depends on one person.
- Negotiate pricing, support and renewals with cloud and tooling vendors.
Requirements
- B.E., B.Tech or MCA
- AWS DevOps Engineer Professional, Azure DevOps Engineer Expert or CKA certification is an advantage
- 10 to 14 years in systems, DevOps or SRE work, with 3 or more years managing a DevOps team
KRAs and KPIs for a DevOps Manager
Key result areas for the appraisal form, each with a KPI you can measure every month or quarter.
| Key result area | How to measure it |
|---|---|
| Deployment frequency | Every production service able to deploy at least daily through the standard pipeline |
| Change failure rate | Failed production changes below 10 percent of deployments each month |
| Recovery time | Mean time to restore for platform incidents under 60 minutes |
| Cloud cost | Cloud spend within the monthly budget, with idle resources cleared every week |
| Platform uptime | CI/CD and shared platform availability of 99.5 percent or more during working hours |
| Team resilience | At least two trained engineers for every critical platform component |
Skills and tools
Tools used day to day: Jenkins, GitLab CI or GitHub Actions, Terraform, Kubernetes and Helm, Argo CD, Prometheus and Grafana, PagerDuty or Opsgenie, AWS or Azure.
Reporting line and career path
Next roles: Head of IT Infrastructure, Director of Engineering, Head of Engineering
Interview questions for a DevOps Manager
- How would you move 60 services with different build scripts onto one standard pipeline?
- Your change failure rate doubled this quarter. How do you find out why?
- How do you run an on-call rota that is fair and does not burn people out?
- The CFO asks why the cloud bill grew faster than traffic. What do you look at?
- Walk me through a Kubernetes upgrade you managed on a production cluster.
- How do you decide what the DevOps team builds and what product teams own?
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What does a DevOps manager do?
A DevOps manager leads the team that builds and runs CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, environments and monitoring. They set the platform roadmap, standardize how code is deployed, run the on-call rota and incident reviews, control cloud cost and work with security on platform controls. Their aim is releases that are fast, safe and routine.
What is the difference between a DevOps manager and a DevOps engineer?
A DevOps engineer builds pipelines, writes infrastructure code and fixes platform issues. A DevOps manager decides what the team builds and in what order, owns budgets and vendor contracts, runs the on-call rota, hires and coaches engineers and reports platform performance to engineering leadership.
What skills do you need to become a DevOps manager?
You need strong hands-on experience with CI/CD, a major cloud, Kubernetes and infrastructure as code, plus the ability to run incidents calmly. Management skills matter as much: planning, hiring, coaching and explaining trade-offs to engineering leaders. Most DevOps managers in India have 10 or more years of experience.