DevOps Engineer at Every Stage

“From 'Why is the deploy broken again?' to 'Let’s design a scalable, observable platform' — the DevOps arc is glorious, chaotic, and often underappreciated.”

Introduction

The DevOps Engineer is the unsung hero of modern engineering orgs — part firefighter, part architect, part therapist. DevOps sits at the intersection of code, infrastructure, automation, and human chaos.

In early-stage companies, DevOps might not even exist as a dedicated role. But as teams scale, so does the complexity of delivering and running software. That’s where DevOps becomes not just helpful, but essential.

Let’s explore how the DevOps Engineer role evolves across team sizes of 3, 10, 25, and 100 engineers — including when this role makes sense, how responsibilities shift, and the hats to wear (and ditch) at every level.

🛠️ Phase 1: Team of 3 Engineers

Does this role make sense?

Not yet. At this stage, DevOps is usually a set of responsibilities shared among engineers or handled by the CTO/technical founder.

The Vibe

“Who broke the deploy?” “We don’t have staging.” “Just SSH into prod and fix it.”
Sound familiar? You're duct-taping Heroku and praying your bash scripts hold.

Key Responsibilities

• CI/CD pipeline basics (usually a janky GitHub Action)
• Manual deploys and rollback scripts
• Monitoring via logs and gut feeling

Hats to Wear ✅

• Build Wrangler: Keep the app shippable
• Script Slinger: Patch gaps with shell, not sophistication

Hats to Avoid ❌

• Terraform Mastermind: IaC is great, but premature
  • Why it’s harmful: Overhead > benefit
  • Who should handle it instead: Just use basic cloud dashboards or templates

Success Looks Like

• Code gets shipped regularly with minimal drama
• You can recover from downtime (eventually)

Pitfalls

• Deploys tightly coupled to individual engineers
• No visibility into system health

🔧 Phase 2: Team of 10 Engineers

Does this role make sense?

Yes, optionally. A full-time DevOps hire starts to make sense, especially if engineers are wasting time on infrastructure or reliability issues.

The Vibe

You're automating pain away. People are cheering when CI passes. But you’re also becoming “the deploy person.”

Key Responsibilities

• Maintain and improve CI/CD
• Add basic observability (logs, metrics, alerts)
• Harden infrastructure (multi-env, rollbacks, backup)
• Infrastructure scripting (Docker, ECS, maybe Terraform)

Hats to Wear ✅

• Delivery Enabler: Automate deploys, reduce cycle time
• Infra Stabilizer: Own uptime and rollout hygiene
• Incident Wrangler: Be calm in chaos

Hats to Avoid ❌

• Tool Hoarder: Don’t bring in 7 tools when 2 will do
  • Why it’s harmful: Onboarding slows, systems fragment
  • Better option: Evaluate tools collaboratively

Success Looks Like

• Deploys are boring (a good thing)
• Monitoring is in place
• Engineers don’t fear releases

Pitfalls

• Becoming a silo
• No clear ownership of incident response

🧱 Phase 3: Team of 25 Engineers

Does this role make sense?

Yes — and now it should be a team. DevOps isn’t a one-person show anymore. Complexity demands shared responsibility.

The Vibe

You’re building the pipes, not just plugging leaks. Infra needs to scale. On-call rotations are real. Postmortems become a thing.

Key Responsibilities

• Build platform-level tooling
• Own infrastructure as code
• Manage environments (dev, staging, prod)
• Lead on-call and incident response systems
• Partner with security for access/logging

Hats to Wear ✅

• Platform Engineer: Enable others through reusable infra
• SRE-Lite: Reliability is now a shared responsibility
• Observability Champion: Know what’s broken before Slack does

Hats to Avoid ❌

• Solo Architect: Don’t be the only person who understands the infra
  • Why it’s harmful: You become a bottleneck
  • Solution: Document, pair, train

Success Looks Like

• On-call is fair and reasonable
• Environments are reliable
• Infra is predictable and versioned

Pitfalls

• Tool sprawl
• Lack of standardization across teams

🧠 Phase 4: Team of 100 Engineers

Does this role make sense?

Absolutely — it’s now an entire org function. DevOps becomes platform engineering, SRE, or infrastructure engineering.

The Vibe

You're running a Platform team. You serve internal “customers.” DevEx is a strategy, not an afterthought.

Key Responsibilities

• Internal platforms (build, deploy, test, observe)
• Developer experience (DX) tooling and documentation
• Security, compliance, and cost optimization
• Org-wide infra governance and consistency

Hats to Wear ✅

• Infra Product Owner: Build and evangelize platform roadmaps
• DevEx Steward: Internal tools matter — treat them like products
• Ops Strategist: Plan for scale, not just speed

Hats to Avoid ❌

• Ticket Taker: Don’t just serve JIRA queues
  • Why it’s harmful: Platform team becomes reactive
  • Better option: Empower teams with self-service tools

Success Looks Like

• High engineering velocity
• Low MTTR, solid uptime
• Teams trust and use platform tooling

Pitfalls

• Platform bloat or underuse
• Poor communication with product engineering

📊 Summary Table

💡 Advice for Aspiring DevOps Engineers

• Automate pain, not process for its own sake.
• Tools are easy — culture is hard. Build both.
• Don’t build alone. Build with the people you’re enabling.
• Docs and dashboards are part of the product.
• Good DevOps is invisible. Great DevOps is boring — in the best way.

DevOps isn’t about tools — it’s about trust, velocity, and clean rollbacks.