Hire DevOps and cloud engineers
AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Terraform
Cloud engineers for teams whose deployments are slow, manual or frightening. Pipelines that finish in minutes, infrastructure described in code, and a cloud bill somebody can explain line by line.
Two problems bring teams to this role. Delivery: deployments take an afternoon, one person knows how, and nobody releases on a Friday. And cost: the AWS bill grew 40% for no obvious reason and nobody can attribute it to a service.
Our DevOps engineers work on both. On delivery that means pipelines in GitHub Actions or GitLab CI that build, test and deploy in minutes, preview environments per pull request, and a rollback that is one command rather than a scramble and a phone call. Infrastructure moves into Terraform or Pulumi, so environments are reproducible and a change is reviewable instead of being somebody's recollection of what they clicked in the console last spring.
On cost it means tagging and per-service attribution first, then right-sizing, spot and savings plans where they fit, and deleting the forgotten NAT gateway or over-provisioned database instance quietly billing more than your entire staging environment.
Security travels with the same work: least-privilege IAM, secrets out of environment files and into a manager, network segmentation, patching, and backups that somebody has actually restored at least once.
When a dedicated DevOps engineer is the right call. Deployment is a bottleneck or a risk. You are moving to containers and want someone who has run them in production rather than followed a tutorial. The cloud bill needs attribution. Compliance requires documented controls. Or you are on a single server that is one hardware failure away from a very bad fortnight.
When it is not. A small application on Vercel or a managed platform rarely needs a dedicated DevOps engineer, and a full-stack developer will cover it. Kubernetes in particular is frequently a cost rather than a solution, so expect an argument before anybody installs it.
Work happens inside your cloud accounts. Credentials stay with you, and every change lands as code you keep.
What they do
CI/CD pipelines
GitHub Actions or GitLab CI that build, test and deploy in minutes, with preview environments and a rollback that is one command.
Infrastructure as code
Terraform or Pulumi modules for reproducible environments, reviewed like application code and versioned alongside it.
Containers and orchestration
Docker images that are small and reproducible, then ECS, Fargate or Kubernetes with autoscaling, probes and honest resource limits.
Cost optimisation
Tagging and attribution, right-sizing, savings plans and spot capacity, plus removing the resources nobody remembers creating.
Monitoring and incident response
Prometheus and Grafana or CloudWatch, alert rules that mean something at 3 a.m., runbooks, and post-incident notes without blame.
Security and compliance
Least-privilege IAM, secret management, network segmentation, patching, and backup restores that have been rehearsed on a calendar.
Skills
Seniority & rates
Sample profiles
Engagement models
Hourly
For bursts of work and part-time needs. Minimum 40 hours. Time tracked in Hubstaff, reported weekly.
- Pay for logged hours only
- Scale up or down weekly
- Same senior engineer throughout
Dedicated monthly
One engineer, full-time, inside your team and your tools. Eight hours a day, five days, in your timezone window.
- 15-day risk-free trial
- Free replacement, no argument
- Daily stand-up, sprint reporting
- NDA + 100% IP assignment
Dedicated pod
Tech lead, three engineers and QA, run as a Scrum team with a delivery manager included in the price.
- Fixed sprint cadence
- Delivery manager at no cost
- Architecture and code review built in
How to hire
How long does a deploy take today?Day 0
That number, plus your monthly cloud spend and whether anybody can rebuild production from scratch, tells us most of what we need.
Profiles, plus the biggest risk we can see48 h
Two CVs and, from an architecture sketch or read-only access, the largest delivery risk and the biggest avoidable cost line we can spot.
Interview, and ask about an outage2–4 days
The story of a bad night, what they changed afterwards, and whether the fix was written down. No charge, and no pressure on a profile you doubt.
Something you can feel in a fortnightDays 1–15
A pipeline that deploys in minutes, an environment described in code, or a cost reduction visible on the next invoice. Stop there and it is unbilled.
Everything in your account, in codeOngoing
NDA and IP before the first commit, least-privilege access to your own cloud, Terraform state in your repository, runbooks written as we go.
FAQ
Do we need Kubernetes?
Probably not. ECS or Fargate runs most workloads at a fraction of the operational cost, and a managed platform is simpler again. Kubernetes earns its place with many services, several teams, or a genuine portability requirement. Expect our engineers to argue against it before they agree to build it.
Can you reduce our AWS bill?
Usually, and often by more than clients expect. Attribution first, tags and cost allocation, then right-sizing, savings plans, storage lifecycle rules and deleting orphaned resources. A 20 to 35% reduction in the first quarter is a common outcome, though yours depends entirely on where you start.
Will they work inside our cloud account?
Always. Least-privilege access to your own accounts, changes made through Terraform in your repository, credentials and state staying with you. Client production infrastructure never sits in our accounts, no matter how convenient it would be during a migration.
Can one engineer cover DevOps and backend development?
For a small team, sometimes. The two roles pull in opposite directions during an incident, though, and paying senior backend rates for infrastructure work is expensive. If you need both, part-time DevOps plus a full-time developer is usually the cheaper mix.
What about on-call and incidents?
Inside your working window the engineer responds and owns the post-incident note. Genuine round-the-clock coverage needs at least three people to be sustainable, and we will tell you that rather than pretend one person can carry a pager indefinitely.
How do you handle compliance requirements?
By making the controls concrete: IAM policies, encryption at rest and in transit, log retention, backup and restore evidence, change history in version control. If you need SOC 2 or ISO 27001 evidence we build and document the technical controls. The audit itself stays yours to run.
Tell us the role. Profiles in 48 hours.
No retainer to see CVs, and no invoice until the trial ends and you say yes.