All have been meaningless except for Cloud Infrastructure Engineer. The rest described a generalist who knows how to deal with ambiguity and (usually) has the trust with things like AWS root account credentials. Most organisations have no idea what real DevOps is. If they did, they wouldn’t hire for a “DevOps Engineer”
Most places mean someone who does development and operations. They see it as a term for someone who has responsibilities on both sides, not a specialty.
In my experience DevOps Engineer has been infrastructure + operations while having a good grasp on code but writing application code was almost never part of the role. Almost every position had a coding interview round though.
Which is still the philosophy (i.e. one person responsible for the whole app lifecycle, from development to production, so there's no diffusion of responsibility when it comes to production readiness).
However, a decent sized team can affort a role which focuses on the orthogonal tooling aspects which benefits all engineers who follow DevOps best practices. And that would be a DevOps Engineer.
I started as Software Developer, then quickly got a Senior title prefixed to that because I became literally the only developer in the startup I was working at , and held the title Senior Software Developer for another 10 years through a few companies. Then, I was promoted to Chief Software Engineer which is my current title. Nothing up for me except maybe CTO or CEO. Not sure I want to move to either.
- DevOps Engineer (Junior, Senior, Staff)
- Systems Development Engineer
- DevOps Team Manager
- Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
- Site Reliability Engineer (+Lead)
All have been meaningless except for Cloud Infrastructure Engineer. The rest described a generalist who knows how to deal with ambiguity and (usually) has the trust with things like AWS root account credentials. Most organisations have no idea what real DevOps is. If they did, they wouldn’t hire for a “DevOps Engineer”
However, a decent sized team can affort a role which focuses on the orthogonal tooling aspects which benefits all engineers who follow DevOps best practices. And that would be a DevOps Engineer.