DevOps Engineer

Also known as: Site Reliability Engineer, SRE, Platform Engineer

Technology & AIBachelor's DegreeModerate Growth

Bridge development and operations by automating deployments, managing infrastructure, and ensuring system reliability.

Salary Range

Entry Level

$80K

Starting salary

→

Top Level

$550K

Top salary

Distinguished Infrastructure Engineer

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 (FAANG-tier).

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:

MITComputer Science

StanfordComputer Science

CMUComputer Science

UC BerkeleyComputer Science

Georgia TechComputer Science

Explore all colleges →

AI Risk Assessment

High Risk (Level 4/5)How we score ›

Platform engineering is swallowing DevOps — Gartner forecasts 80% of software organizations will have platform teams by 2026. AI-powered platforms (Vercel, Railway) abstract entire infrastructure layers, while AI agents generate Terraform configs, debug Kubernetes, and auto-remediate incidents. One senior engineer with AI tools genuinely replaces a traditional DevOps team, and junior pipeline-maintenance roles are disappearing into platform automation.