The DevOps market is forecasted to reach $25.5 billion by 2028, and the salaries for DevOps roles can go as high as $230,000 per year.
If you would like to explore the DevOps realm or make a switch, it would be beneficial to understand the average pay, preferred experience level, offered working modes and more to make your decision easier.
To analyze all the details for DevOps roles, we will use insights from Kube Careers’ State of the Kubernetes job market report for Q1 2025 — one of the most condensed datasets in the cloud computing domain.
Kubernetes Careers only publishes jobs that require Kubernetes experience, have clear salary ranges and are not published by recruitment agencies. For Q1 2025, they collected over 1,200 jobs, painstakingly narrowing these down to a dataset of 436 for their thorough analysis.
Let’s dig into the numbers:
One in 10 Kubernetes Roles is DevOps
Of all the jobs published on Kube Careers for Q1 2025:
- Software Engineer roles accounted for 47.02% (205)
- Platform Engineer (PE) roles accounted for 11.47% (50)
- DevOps positions followed closely with 9.56% (43).
Additional roles included:
- Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at 4.82% (21 jobs)
- Machine Learning (ML) Engineer at 4.59% (20 jobs)
- Data Engineer at 3.44% (15 jobs)
- DevSecOps Engineer at 3.21% (14).
In fact, DevOps roles were the second most popular Kubernetes roles in 2024, averaging 9-12% through the quarters.
How Much Does a DevOps Engineer Earn in Q1 2025?
The minimum average salary for DevOps positions is $118,756, and the maximum average is $169,824, bringing the mean salary to $144,290 for Q1 2025.
How Does the Average DevOps Salary Compare to Other Popular Job Titles?
If we compare the average salaries for the most popular job titles in Q1 2025, we find that:
- The highest average minimum salary (a better indicator of salary ranges) is for PE roles at $143,001, closely followed by SRE positions at $142,623. Interestingly, DevOps jobs pay the least average minimum salary among the popular job titles (we may just know why, later).
- The hierarchy for the highest average salaries looks like this: PE > SRE > Software Engineer > DevOps Engineer > Machine Learning Engineer. Here, too, DevOps roles are at the bottom two.
- When it comes to the average salary, DevOps has the least at $144,290, which is 20% lower than PE roles and about 5% less than Software Engineer positions.
In fact, the average DevOps salary was $141,645 in 2024, which is now higher by almost 2% in Q1 2025.
The Low Average Salaries for DevOps Positions may be due to the Preferred Experience Level for These Roles
Here are the takeaways when we compare preferred experience levels with popular job titles:
- A certain senior-level experience was required for 85% of the PE roles in Q1 2025, 74.42% for DevOps roles, while 71.71% for Software Engineer roles
- Interestingly, most lead-level jobs were DevOps roles (9.30%); meanwhile, there were none for PE roles
- What stands out is that there were more Junior PE (6.38%) positions than DevOps (2.33%) and Software Engineer (5.37%).
The demand for senior or higher-level experience is similar for most roles, and it doesn’t influence salaries as much. DevOps salaries are, in fact, lower on average.
Four out of 10 DevOps roles are Remote, Two are Hybrid and Two are In-Office
If we look at DevOps positions with respect to working modes, it gets rather interesting.
46.5% of the DevOps roles are remote but they are restricted within a specific geography (usually within the country), 26.6% are strictly in-office roles (five days a week), 23.3% are hybrid, while 4.7% are remote but restricted within a particular time zone (e.g., within -3 to +3 GMT).
Summary
The highlights of this short analysis are:
- The average DevOps salary for Q1 2025 is $144,290.
- Only 20% of DevOps roles require in-office presence (5 days a week).
- When it comes to preferred experience levels, 8 out of 10 DevOps positions require senior-level experience.