DevOps Engineer
| Median wage (USD) | 135980 |
|---|---|
| Projected employment growth (%) | 10 |
| AI exposure (%) | 45 |
| Maximum exposure (%) | 84 |
| Source | eloundou |
| What AI changes in this occupation | Writing and maintaining deployment scripts and infrastructure configuration is delegated to AI Defining continuous integration and delivery pipelines, reading logs and diagnosing incidents become AI-assisted Architecture arbitration, production incident response and accountability for uptime remain human |
| Key skills | Automation and infrastructure as code · continuous integration and delivery · containers and cloud · observability and reliability |
| Courses to get ahead | IBM DevOps and Software Engineering Professional Certificate · Coursera · 6 months · 92 · CI/CD pipelines, containers, Kubernetes and infrastructure as code: you learn to build the whole deployment chain — the part AI now writes under your supervision. Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Cloud DevOps Engineer Professional Certificate (Google Cloud) · Coursera · 1.5 months · 89 · Reliability, service-level objectives and deployment automation: accountability for uptime, which stays human while configuration generation is delegated. Continuous Integration (University of California, Davis) · Coursera · 2 weeks · 84 · Building and hardening a continuous integration chain, from Travis CI to build logs: the foundation AI accelerates but that you own when the build breaks. Introduction to DevOps (IBM) · Coursera · 9 hours · 83 Fundamentals of Kubernetes Deployment (LearnQuest) · Coursera · 8 hours · 80 Getting Started with Terraform for Google Cloud (Google Cloud) · Coursera · 6 hours · 78 |
| Occupations to pivot toward | Network and Computer Systems Administrator · 99130 · -4 · 51 Computer Network Architect · 134050 · 8 · 55 Computer and Information Systems Manager · 175140 · 16 · 56 |
| Skills to acquire for the pivot | Eloundou's measured exposure is 45% (human β) and rises to 84% (human ζ): writing and maintaining deployment scripts and infrastructure configuration, test and validation procedures, handling operational data and producing reports are largely delegable to AI, but framing with analysts and engineers, performance standards, installation coordination and production incident response remain human. The ζ of 84% says a large share of the job is transformable; the β of 45% says that today AI does less than half of it without supervision. BLS growth is +10% from 2025 to 2035 (much faster than the 3% average) for software developers (SOC 15-1252): their 1,717,800 jobs are projected to reach 1,892,600 (+174,700), with about 106,100 openings a year for the combined 'software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers' group. Demand comes from AI itself: companies deploying models need pipelines, observability and cloud — the job grows because it industrialises what AI makes possible. The median salary ($135,980, May 2025) is that of the BLS 'Software Developers' profile (SOC 15-1252), whose O*NET page lists 'DevOps Engineer' among its reported job titles; the combined 'software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers' group shows $134,040. The lowest 10% earn less than $82,460 and the highest 10% more than $214,670. It is above network and computer systems administrators ($99,130) and in line with computer network architects ($134,050), without reaching computer and information systems managers ($175,140). Consistency note: the site's `developpeur` card, which shares this SOC code, still carries the previous BLS edition ($133,080, +15%, 2024-34: it was not touched by this insertion). |
| GPT-4 exposure — beta / zeta (%) | 87 · 95 |