DevOps jobs remain in high demand in 2025 – in fact, DevOps engineer ranks among the top five most sought-after IT roles worldwide.
Organizations are doubling down on automation, cloud infrastructure, and AI in DevOps, increasing the need for specialists who can bridge development and operations.
Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced engineer looking to upskill, understanding the top DevOps roles of 2025 and the tools they require will help you focus your learning.
A recent survey found that over one-third of IT leaders report a DevOps skills gap on their teams, prompting 68% of companies to invest in DevOps upskilling.
Refonte Learning DevOps Engineering programs help professionals gain the skills needed for these in-demand roles. Let’s explore the key DevOps roles – from CI/CD engineers to SREs – and the key tools each one uses.
Who is a DevOps Engineer?
The DevOps Engineer is the foundation of most DevOps teams – a jack-of-all-trades who handles a bit of everything in the software delivery pipeline.
In this role, you are responsible for automating builds and deployments, configuring infrastructure, and monitoring applications in production. It’s a broad role that touches development, IT operations, and quality assurance.
Many DevOps Engineers start by setting up version control and CI/CD pipelines, managing cloud servers, and ensuring that development and operations workflows run smoothly.
Because the scope is so wide, the DevOps Engineer role is often an entry point into DevOps that gives you exposure to many tools and process.
Key Tools & Technologies
DevOps Engineers typically work with version control systems (e.g. Git and GitHub), continuous integration servers like Jenkins or GitLab CI, and container platforms such as Docker and Kubernetes.
They use infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools (Terraform, CloudFormation) to manage cloud resources on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, and configuration management tools (Ansible, Chef, Puppet) to automate environment setup.
Monitoring and logging are also part of the job, so familiarity with tools like Prometheus, Grafana, or the ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) is valuable.
In essence, a DevOps Engineer needs a bit of everything – coding/scripting ability, cloud admin skills, CI/CD tooling, and a mindset of continuous improvement.
Refonte Learning’s DevOps curriculum, for example, covers end-to-end skills from pipelines to cloud monitoring, reflecting the breadth of this role.
Actionable Tip: If you’re new to DevOps, start here. Build a personal project where you practice setting up a CI/CD pipeline and deploying a simple app to the cloud. This will expose you to the core tools a DevOps Engineer uses daily. Consider a certification like AWS DevOps Engineer or Azure DevOps Expert to validate these broad skills once you have some experience.
CI/CD Pipeline Engineer (Continuous Delivery Specialist)
In some organizations, the CI/CD pipeline becomes so critical that a dedicated CI/CD Engineer (also called Build/Release Engineer) is appointed to own it.
This specialist focuses on the “Dev” to “Ops” handoff – designing and maintaining continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines that compile code, run automated tests, and push releases with minimal manual intervention.
As a CI/CD Pipeline Engineer, you ensure that merging code and deploying to production is a fast, reliable process.
You might create pipeline scripts, set up build agents, and integrate tools for automated testing and security scans into the workflow.
The goal is to enable frequent, error-free deployments (at elite companies, deployments can happen dozens of times per day).
Key Tools & Technologies
CI/CD specialists are masters of automation. They often use Jenkins, TeamCity, or CircleCI for continuous integration, along with cloud-based CI/CD services like GitHub Actions or GitLab CI. Source code management (Git) is a given.
For delivery, they work with artifact repositories (e.g. JFrog Artifactory, Nexus) and container registries to manage build outputs.
They also integrate infrastructure deployment into pipelines using tools like Terraform, Helm (for Kubernetes), or AWS CodePipeline. Knowledge of container orchestration (Kubernetes) and scripting is important, since modern pipelines frequently deploy containerized applications to Kubernetes clusters.
A CI/CD Engineer’s toolkit may include test automation frameworks and even AI-driven pipeline optimizations. For instance, AI copilots can help generate and refine CI scripts.
Refonte Learning emphasizes CI/CD heavily in its DevOps training – nearly all DevOps job listings in 2025 require strong pipeline automation skills.
Actionable Tip: Try creating a CI/CD pipeline for a sample project on a platform like GitHub. Use GitHub Actions (free for many uses) to automate a build-test-deploy sequence. This hands-on practice will teach you how pipeline tools work together. Keep an eye on emerging trends like pipeline-as-code and AI enhancements in CI/CD – these are increasingly part of the DevOps workflow.
Platform Engineer (Internal Platforms & Developer Experience)
Platform Engineers have emerged as one of the top DevOps roles of 2025, reflecting the industry’s focus on improving developer experience.
A Platform Engineer builds and maintains the “internal developer platform” – the tooling and environments that software teams use to develop, test, and deploy applications.
Instead of handling one-off infrastructure requests, platform engineering creates self-service systems and standardized environments so that developers can get what they need on demand.
In practice, this means assembling a common platform (often based on Kubernetes and cloud services) that abstracts away low-level complexity.
Platform Engineers act like product managers for the dev team’s infrastructure: they treat the platform as a product, gather requirements from developers, and deliver a stable, reusable set of tools and environments.
Key Tools & Technologies
Platform Engineers require strong software and infrastructure skills. They work heavily with container orchestration (Kubernetes or OpenShift) to provide scalable environments.
IaC tools like Terraform or Pulumi are used to provision cloud resources in a repeatable way. GitOps has become central to platform engineering – using tools like Argo CD or Flux to manage environment configs via Git. Many teams deploy internal developer portals (e.g.
Backstage) to give developers a one-stop interface to access builds, dev environments, and databases.
Other common tools include service mesh (Istio or Linkerd) for microservice management, CI/CD systems integrated with the platform, and secrets management (Vault) for security.
Because platform engineering spans many domains, Platform Engineers often code in languages like Go or Python to build automation tooling.
The rise of this role is tied to efficiency: companies find that providing developers a paved road of curated tools boosts productivity and reliability.
We've seen platform engineering skills become highly sought-after as organizations adopt internal platforms to manage growing cloud complexity.
Actionable Tip: If you aim to become a Platform Engineer, gain experience with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure at scale. Try building a mini “platform” in a cloud environment – for example, use Terraform to set up a Kubernetes cluster with CI/CD and monitoring baked in. Focus on understanding developer pain points and how to solve them with self-service tools. This role benefits from a product mindset as much as pure technical skill.
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
The Site Reliability Engineer is a reliability-focused DevOps role, popularized by Google and now common in companies of all size. SREs are tasked with keeping applications and services running smoothly and efficiently.
They apply software engineering principles to IT operations, striving to automate and improve system reliability.
As an SRE, you define reliability targets (SLAs/SLOs), build monitoring and alerting systems, and respond to incidents.
A big part of the job is automating manual ops tasks and fixing problems at the root to prevent future outages. SREs work closely with development teams to ensure new releases meet reliability standards. This role is highly sought-after, since uptime is so critical for businesses.
Key Tools & Technologies
Monitoring and observability tools are the bread and butter of SREs. Expect to use Prometheus (for metrics collection) and Grafana (for dashboards), or managed suites like Datadog, New Relic, and Splunk for end-to-end visibility.
Log aggregation tools such as the ELK Stack (Elasticsearch/Logstash/Kibana) or Grafana Loki help analyze system and application logs.
Incident management tools (PagerDuty, Opsgenie) are essential for on-call alerting and coordination. SREs also leverage a lot of automation – from writing scripts in Python/Go for routine tasks to using configuration management (Chef, Ansible) for consistent environments.
In 2025, many SRE teams are adopting AIOps platforms that apply AI to detect anomalies and predict incidents before they happen, reducing alert fatigue and speeding up recovery.
Container orchestration knowledge (Kubernetes) is common, since many services run on K8s. In summary, an SRE’s toolkit spans monitoring, logging, incident response, and plenty of scripting/automation.
Refonte Learning DevOps Engineering course includes dedicated modules on monitoring and incident response in its DevOps courses, reflecting how crucial SRE skills are for a DevOps career path centered on reliability.
Actionable Tip: To build SRE skills, start by improving the observability of a system. For instance, deploy a sample web application and set up Prometheus + Grafana to monitor its metrics (CPU, memory, request latency) and Alertmanager to send alerts on threshold breaches. Practice writing a postmortem for a hypothetical outage – learning from failure is core to SRE culture. Also get comfortable with a cloud provider’s monitoring services (like AWS CloudWatch or Google Cloud Operations) since many SRE roles require cloud-specific expertise.
Cloud DevOps Engineer (Cloud Infrastructure Specialist)
With the majority of organizations running in the cloud today, the Cloud DevOps Engineer has become a critical role. This is essentially a DevOps Engineer who specializes in cloud platforms and services.
Cloud DevOps Engineers design CI/CD and infrastructure workflows tailored to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud environments, taking advantage of cloud-native services.
For example, in AWS they might use CodePipeline for CI/CD, CloudFormation or Terraform for IaC, and CloudWatch for monitoring; in Azure, they might implement Azure DevOps pipelines and use ARM/Bicep templates.
The Cloud DevOps Engineer ensures that an organization’s DevOps practices are aligned with its cloud strategy – automating cloud resource provisioning, optimizing performance and cost, and using managed services (containers, databases, serverless) to simplify operations.
Key Tools & Technologies
Deep expertise in at least one cloud provider is expected. This includes knowing the cloud’s CI/CD and deployment tools (e.g. AWS CodePipeline/CodeDeploy, Azure Pipelines, Google Cloud Build), container/orchestration services (AWS ECS or EKS, Azure AKS, Google GKE), and serverless platforms (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, etc.).
IaC tools are crucial – you might use Terraform for cloud-agnostic provisioning, and cloud-specific frameworks like AWS CloudFormation or Azure Bicep.
Cloud DevOps Engineers also use general DevOps toolchains: Docker for containerizing apps, Kubernetes for orchestration, and a mix of monitoring tools (cloud-native monitors plus tools like Prometheus/Grafana for custom metrics).
Security and compliance automation is often part of the role as well (using cloud IAM policies, secrets managers, etc.). Given that over 85% of organizations have a cloud-first strategy, mastering cloud DevOps skills is a smart career move.
Refonte Learning supports this by offering cloud-specific DevOps labs (for example, deploying real projects on AWS or Azure with Terraform and Kubernetes – a typical scenario for Cloud DevOps Engineers).
Actionable Tip: Pick a cloud platform and get hands-on. For instance, learn AWS by automating the deployment of a web app on AWS: use Terraform to set up the infrastructure, configure a CI/CD pipeline (AWS CodePipeline), and implement monitoring with CloudWatch or Prometheus. Earning a cloud certification (AWS DevOps Engineer – Professional, Azure DevOps Engineer Expert, etc.) can also validate your expertise. The key is to combine knowledge of cloud services with general DevOps best practices.
Conclusion
In summary, all these DevOps roles share a common goal: to streamline software delivery and keep systems reliable. Each role offers a different path depending on whether you prefer automation, platform building, or site reliability.
The key is to master the tools and practices of your chosen specialty – that will make you a valuable asset in the job market. Remember, continuous learning is part of the DevOps ethos.
By leveraging Refonte Learning resources and staying curious about new trends (from automation to AI), you can build a strong foundation and thrive in your DevOps career.
Ready to Launch Your DevOps Career?
Join Refonte Learning’s hands-on DevOps Engineering Course and master CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, Docker, Kubernetes, and real-world monitoring tools like Prometheus and Grafana.
Learn from industry experts, build production-grade projects, and earn a certification that gets recruiters’ attention.
FAQ About DevOps Job Roles 2025
Q: Which DevOps role is best for beginners in 2025?
A: For most people starting out, the general DevOps Engineer role is the ideal entry point. It exposes you to the full pipeline (CI/CD, cloud, monitoring), giving you a broad base to later specialize as an SRE, Platform Engineer, etc. Many professionals begin with this role to build foundational skills before moving into more specialized positions.
Q: What skills do I need to become a DevOps Engineer?
A: DevOps engineers need a mix of technical and soft skills. Technical must-haves include Linux, scripting (Python/Bash), version control (Git), CI/CD pipeline tools, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and cloud infrastructure basics. Equally crucial are collaboration and communication abilities, since DevOps is about breaking silos between teams.
Q: How is a Platform Engineer different from a DevOps Engineer?
A: A DevOps Engineer covers the entire software delivery pipeline, while a Platform Engineer focuses on creating and managing the internal developer platform (the self-service infrastructure and tools for developers). It’s a more specialized role typically found in larger organizations. In smaller companies, a DevOps Engineer often handles platform engineering tasks as part of their broader role.
Q: Will AI replace DevOps jobs?
A: No – AI will augment DevOps jobs, not replace them. Automation and AI tools can take over repetitive tasks (for example, optimizing CI pipelines or spotting issues early), which frees DevOps engineers to focus on higher-level work. In 2025, AI is like a co-pilot for DevOps – it improves efficiency and insights, but human expertise in decision-making and culture remains irreplaceable.
Q: How can I start my DevOps career path?
A: Start with the basics: learn a scripting language (Python or Bash), Linux fundamentals, and source control (Git). Next, practice building a simple CI/CD pipeline for a sample application and get hands-on with container tools like Docker. Online courses or bootcamps (Refonte Learning, Coursera, etc.) can provide structure, but creating your own projects – even small ones you deploy to the cloud – is key to gaining practical experience and building a strong portfolio.