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DevOps & SRE:pipelines, containers, observability — and uptime as a number.
CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, monitoring. DevOps hiring grew ~19% year on year in India; SRE adds the operations discipline (SLOs, on-call, incident reviews) that senior roles demand.
What the job is
- Build CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins), container images, registries
- Run Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE or self-hosted), Helm, ingress, secrets, autoscaling
- Infrastructure as code, GitOps (Argo CD), environment promotion
- Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, alerting; SLOs, on-call, blameless post-mortems
Core skills
- Linux, networking, one cloud
- Git fluently; YAML without tears
- Docker → Kubernetes → Helm
- Terraform/Ansible
- Monitoring design, incident management
GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, JenkinsDocker, Kubernetes, Helm, Argo CDTerraform, AnsiblePrometheus, Grafana, Loki, Alertmanager, Opsgenie/PagerDutySonarQube, Trivy, Vault
Certifications that matter in India
| Certification | Issuer | Level | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) | CNCF | Mid | The one DevOps cert that is consistently respected |
| CKAD / CKS | CNCF | Mid–Advanced | Developer / security variants |
| Terraform Associate | HashiCorp | Mid | IaC |
| AWS DevOps Engineer Professional | AWS | Senior | Cloud-heavy DevOps |
| Red Hat RHCE / OpenShift (EX280) | Red Hat | Mid | Enterprise OpenShift estates |
The path
- 0–6 monthsLinux + Git + Docker; containerise a simple app; GitHub Actions pipeline
- 6–18 monthsKubernetes (k3s at home), Helm, Prometheus/Grafana; junior DevOps/build engineer
- 18–36 monthsDevOps engineer: IaC, GitOps, multi-env pipelines, on-call; CKA
- 3–6 yearsSRE/platform engineer: SLOs, capacity, reliability reviews, internal developer platform
Typical pay (India, 2026)
| Level | Range |
|---|---|
| Junior DevOps | ₹4–7 LPA |
| DevOps engineer (2–4 yrs) | ₹8–16 LPA |
| Senior DevOps / SRE | ₹16–30 LPA |
| Platform lead / principal | ₹30–60 LPA |
Product companies and GCCs in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Delhi-NCR pay at the top of each band; service companies at the bottom. Contract/migration work pays a premium.
Labs to do this month- k3s cluster on 3 VMs; deploy an app with Helm; expose with ingress + TLS
- Argo CD GitOps: change a value in Git, watch it roll out; roll back
- Prometheus + Grafana + Alertmanager; define an SLO and an alert that pages only when it matters
Want this path with a mentor and real projects?
We hire and train engineers for client work, and we connect vetted engineers with companies. Search terms people use for this role: devops engineer jobs india · cka certification · kubernetes course · jenkins vs github actions · sre vs devops.