DevOps Engineer
Also known as: Site Reliability Engineer, SRE, Platform Engineer
Bridge development and operations by automating deployments, managing infrastructure, and ensuring system reliability.
Salary Range
The highest-paid specialization or seniority level for devops engineers.
About 1 in 333 reaches this level
Around 300K DevOps/platform engineers (est., no BLS code; partially mapped to BLS 15-1252); only the top ~0.3% reach Distinguished/Principal Infrastructure Engineer at $550K+ total comp — perhaps 20-40 at each of the ~20-30 top-paying tech companies, 400-1,200 people (est.).
Salary data based on 2025 BLS, Glassdoor, and industry reports. Actual compensation varies by location, experience, and employer.
How to Become One
This career typically requires a bachelor's degree. Here are the top colleges for it:
Cost to Qualify
Four years of tuition and required fees runs about $56K at a typical public college in our list (in-state) and about $288K at a typical private one. Both are pricier than the US national averages (about $48K public in-state, $180K private nonprofit, College Board 2025-26) because our 161-college dataset only includes nationally-ranked schools, not every US college. This excludes room and board, which we show separately on each college's page.
Sticker price, not what most people pay — scholarships, aid and in-state status all move it. Room and board is shown separately on each college's page.
AI Risk Assessment
DevOps engineers build and run the systems that take software from a developer's laptop to the people using it: automated testing and release pipelines, cloud servers, monitoring, and the fixes when something breaks in the middle of the night. Most of that work is writing and maintaining code and configuration files, the kind of work AI tools are best at. A 2025 Microsoft Research study measured how much of each job's tasks AI chatbots can help with, using 200,000 real conversations. Network and computer systems administrators, whose tasks BLS says are increasingly done by DevOps engineers, came out in the top fifth of 785 jobs, close to software developers. BLS projects systems administrator jobs to shrink 4% from 2025 to 2035. It says some of their tasks are being taken over by software developers focused on DevOps, some are being outsourced, and administrators are automating routine tasks themselves.
That same BLS finding shows why this is not a 5: the work is moving toward DevOps, not disappearing. BLS describes the people doing it as software developers, a group it projects to grow 10% over the same decade. In a 2024 survey of employers for the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, DevOps engineers were among the 15 fastest-growing jobs to 2030. We still rate it 4, level with software engineering, because it faces the same pressure: AI is best at the routine scripting and setup work that newcomers learn on, and the older systems administrator job, where much of this work used to sit, is shrinking. The employer survey is more optimistic than we are, and you should weigh that. The Microsoft researchers also warn that a high score does not by itself mean job losses.
What would change this score. We have no hiring data specific to DevOps, so this score leans on the evidence for software engineering. If junior DevOps and platform roles keep being posted and filled while AI tools spread, it should come down to 3. If companies start running their infrastructure with AI agents and much smaller operations teams, it goes to 5.
Sources
Ratings reflect a 10-year outlook based on 2025-2026 research, weighted toward entry-level impact. Individual outcomes will vary.
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