DevOps Team: Roles and Responsibilities in 2025

DevOps roles and responsibilities revolve around bridging the gap between development and operations to foster a collaborative, agile, and efficient environment.

Teams typically comprise developers, testers, automation experts, quality assurance, security professionals, and release managers, each contributing to streamlining the CI/CD pipeline, automating repetitive tasks, and ensuring robust infrastructure management through practices like Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

Leadership, often in the form of a DevOps evangelist, is essential for driving cultural change, breaking down silos, and ensuring that security and compliance are integrated from the outset.

Overall, DevOps emphasizes continuous improvement, rapid iteration, and cross-functional teamwork to deliver high-quality software that meets customer-centric business objectives.

• DevOps Team Structure 
• Responsibilities of DevOps Teams
• What are the Roles in a DevOps Team?
• How to Increase Efficiency in DevOps Teams?
• Best Practices to Succeed as a DevOps Team
• FAQs

DevOps Team Structure

DevOps teams comprise professionals from development, quality, security, and the operations segment.

• Senior DevOps: As the team’s core responsibility would be on the person who owns the DevOps team, a senior person from the organization would be an ideal person to lead the team.

• DevOps Evangelist: This will ensure that the responsibilities of DevOps processes are assigned to the right people.

• Software developer/tester: Builds and tests code throughout the application lifecycle.

• Automation engineer/automation expert: Focuses on automating manual, repetitive tasks like deployments, tests, and infrastructure.

• Quality assurance professional: This person ensures that the software meets quality standards before deployment. They design test plans, run automated and manual tests, and validate CI/CD output.

• Security Engineer: Embeds security into every development phase by implementing DevSecOps practices, scanning code for vulnerabilities, managing secrets, and enforcing compliance policies.

• Release manager: Oversees the entire release lifecycle, from planning, scheduling, and building CI/CD pipelines to ensuring smooth deployment into production.

• Platform Engineer: This position focuses on building and maintaining internal developer platforms (IDPs) to streamline software delivery and reduce developers’ cognitive load.

• Site Reliability Engineer (SRE): Combines software and systems engineering to build and run large-scale, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems.

• AI/ML Ops Engineer: Specializes in integrating machine learning models into the CI/CD pipeline, ensuring seamless deployment and monitoring of AI applications.

• DevSecOps Engineer: Integrates security practices into the DevOps process, emphasizing a “shift-left” approach to identify and address security issues early in the development lifecycle.

The granularity of the team ultimately depends on the size of the organization.

Read our blog on SRE vs DevOps

Leadership in the DevOps Team

DevOps teams are ideally led by a senior member of the organization who knows business processes, has the technical expertise, and interacts with all employees.

• The leader should articulate a clear vision across the team, drive intent, inspire, motivate, and encourage everyone.
• Seamless collaboration and engagement help everyone be motivated and align with organizational objectives. 
• The leadership should recognize skilled individuals and train them to become leaders with personal support, coaching, etc.
• Decentralizing decision-making enables the team to share DevOps roles and responsibilities across the board while allowing them to expedite processes.
• The leader should ideally be a role model, show integrity, create a trustworthy environment, and inspire others to follow that path. 

Learn more about how to collaborate as a team, by reading our blog Remote Collaboration: A complete guide 2024 Edition

Responsibilities of DevOps Teams

In a DevOps environment, cross-functional teams share common responsibilities. Here are some of the DevOps team’s responsibilities:

DevOps Responsibilities: CI/CD Pipelines

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) sits at the heart of DevOps. This pipeline comprises integrated processes to automate build, test, and deployment. serverless CI/CD pipelines have become prevalent, allowing teams to build and deploy applications without managing the underlying infrastructure

In the Build phase, a compilation of the application takes place using a version control system. Here, the build is validated based on the organizational compliance requirements. In the test phase, the code is tested, and the Release phase delivers the application to the repository. In the deployment phase, the application is deployed to the required platforms.  

Serverless CI/CD platforms like GitHub Actions, AWS CodeCatalyst, and Harness are becoming standard, enabling teams to scale deployments without provisioning agents or runners manually.

Continuous Delivery takes the applications and delivers them to selected infrastructures. Testing moves to the left part of the CI/CD pipeline, wherein code is automatically tested before being delivered to production. It improves collaboration and quality. 

CI/CD has a huge impact on software development; that’s why we’ll see this trend in the Future of DevOps.

AI-Driven Automation & Observability

In 2025, AI-driven automation and observability will be key to modern DevOps. AI/ML tools continuously monitor logs, metrics, and system traces to identify anomalies in real time, enabling early issue detection. Predictive maintenance models forecast potential failures, allowing teams to address problems proactively.

Automated responses reduce incident resolution times, while dynamic resource scaling optimizes performance and cost efficiency. Together, these capabilities enhance overall system resilience and operational efficiency.

• Tools like Datadog, Dynatrace, and AWS CloudWatch utilize anomaly detection and root cause analysis via machine learning.
• ChatOps and incident bots automatically escalate issues and generate recovery playbooks.
• AI-driven predictive scaling replaces manual resource configuration in cloud environments.

DevOps Responsibilities: Cloud/Server/Network Architectures

DevOps leverages cloud technology to build scalable, flexible applications using architectures such as microservices, serverless, and cloud platforms.

Traditional monolithic architectures, while stable, hinder scalability and flexibility due to their tightly-coupled nature. In contrast, microservices break applications into more minor, independently deployable services that enhance productivity, scalability, and reliability, perfectly complementing DevOps practices.

Additionally, cloud architecture integrates various technologies (e.g., automation, orchestration, APIs, containerization, security) across different deployment models (public, private, hybrid, multi-cloud) to further streamline application management and innovation.

Cloud-native stacks are often built around event buses (like EventBridge), orchestrators (like Step Functions), and sidecars (e.g., service meshes) for granular control.

Serverless architecture, also known as Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), allows you to run applications on third-party servers without managing underlying hardware. Unlike Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which hosts entire applications, serverless focus on deploying and scaling individual functions, with costs incurred only for the functions used. AWS Lambda is a common example of FaaS.

Read our blog about PaaS vs SaaS vs IaaS

In a DevOps team, a DevOps architect designs the infrastructure and sets guidelines, while a DevOps engineer implements and automates these processes using tools like Infrastructure as Code (IaC), with ongoing monitoring by the architect throughout the product lifecycle.

DevOps Responsibilities: Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an innovative concept for managing infrastructure operations using code. Unlike traditional environments, where manual configuration files and scripts are used to manage configuration, IaC performs operations using code in an automated environment. It treats infrastructure as code, applying version control systems, monitoring tools, and virtualization tests to automate and govern the operations as you do with code releases.

The code describes, manages, and converges a machine’s or the infrastructure’s desired state. IaC is not just for automation, it also allows you to implement DevOps best practices to remove errors, perform testing on infrastructure, streamline operations, faster deployments, and flexibility to change and rebuild the entire system within seconds in times of a disaster. While you avoid documentation, seamless collaboration becomes a reality.

GitOps (e.g., ArgoCD, Flux) and policy-as-code (e.g., Open Policy Agent) are essential companions to IaC—enabling version-controlled, secure infra deployments.

I recommend this blog about Infrastructure as code, which discusses its benefits!

DevOps Responsibilities: Cloud migrations

Cloud migrations demand a strategic DevOps approach that begins with assessing current IT infrastructure and cloud readiness. Organizations can choose from strategies like platforming, rehosting, repurchasing, rebuilding, refactoring, or retiring applications.

A cross-functional DevOps team comprising IT, operations, security, finance, and management—collaborates to design a migration framework covering three key levels: infrastructure, applications, and data.

Once migrated, DevOps engineers, under the guidance of DevOps architects, implement CI/CD pipelines and continuous monitoring, paving the way for a smooth transformation in the new cloud environment. Migrating between cloud providers (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) requires additional expertise to realign software and navigate multi-cloud complexities.

Moving your apps and data to the cloud is not easy. Cloud migration strategies differ from one organization to another. Some strategies you could follow are replatforming, Rehosting, Repurchasing, Rebuilding, refactoring, and retiring. You need to prepare and implement a migration strategy by assessing application capabilities and cloud readiness, choosing the right provider, migrating apps and data, and performing post-validation.

Multi-cloud strategies are more prevalent in 2025. Tools like Crossplane and Terraform Cloud enable orchestration across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Discover how we provide AWS migration and implement IaC for a music company!

DevOps Responsibilities: Security Compliance

Security compliance is essential in every release cycle, requiring security to be integrated from the planning stage. DevSecOps automates security processes to keep pace with continuous delivery, ensuring that developers adhere to compliance standards.

This involves system hardening—removing unnecessary components and customizing security rules to reduce vulnerabilities—and automating these rules with granular scripts. Continuous verification and monitoring maintain baseline security, while integrating information security specialists throughout the DevOps process ensures ongoing compliance and improvement across the product lifecycle.

tools like Snyk, Checkov, and Wiz are widely adopted to enforce security-as-code in Terraform, Kubernetes, and GitHub workflows.

Discover ClickIT’s Cloud security services!

This is one of the top DevOps Trends teams should follow; read the full blog to learn more.

Practice and Evangelize the DevOps culture across the IT department

When culture is deeply rooted in an organization, resistance to change is a big bottleneck. As DevOps is not just a tool or a technology, it is important to see a top-down cultural shift across the organization.

Teams should break down silos and find a common ground to communicate and collaborate seamlessly. It should happen from business perspectives to deployment and maintenance across all stakeholders, departments, and stages of development.

With different tools, technologies, processes, and people, achieving this is a herculean task. It only happens when everyone imbibes this change, practices, and evangelizes the concept. DevOps leader holds a key role in this responsibility.

DevOps Responsibilities: Continuous Monitoring

Continuous monitoring in DevOps provides real-time feedback on the performance of an application in production. QA needs to match this pace to run automated tests as development gets faster in DevOps. QA being dependent on CI, continuous monitoring becomes an integral part of every stage of the product life cycle.

The current monitoring tools are not just confined to production environments, but they also proactively monitor the entire app stack. When monitoring is integrated into the DevOps lifecycle, tracking DevOps KPIs becomes easy, and app deployments become efficient. It also facilitates seamless collaboration between development and operations teams.

Read our blog DevOps Metrics and KPIs that CTOs Must Monitor to learn how to measure your DevOps team effectively and their work performance during project delivery

DevOps Responsibilities: IT Support

IT support is another critical team that should be integrated into the DevOps lifecycle. It should be automated to match the speed and scale of agile development. When developers push code to production, they can convey known errors to the support team. Similarly, Kbs related to incidents and problems should be communicated to all members so that everyone is educated about issues and incidents. 

Right from the service desk to operations and development, everyone should be responsible and linked with tickets raised so that they are updated with the happenings in the infrastructure. By linking tickets to corresponding releases or changes, you can reduce errors and build apps faster.

DevOps Responsibilities: On call (Incident Management)

On-call Incident management is not very different in DevOps environments. The only change is that developers are also involved in this process. Teams collaboratively identify vulnerabilities and are prepared to handle incidents efficiently. With monitoring tools, continuous feedback, and alerting tools, teams detect, respond, and resolve issues along with a post-mortem process. 

While one on-call engineer responds to incidents, DevOps teams assign multiple people for escalations so that the on-call engineer can escalate it to the right person or team. Once the issue is resolved, teams analyze the system again to prepare for future incidents.

What are the Roles in a DevOps Team?

DevOps Roles: DevOps Engineer

A DevOps engineer is responsible for designing the right infrastructure required for teams to build and deliver products continuously. The engineer identifies project requirements and KPIs and customizes the tool stack.

He is well-versed in automation tools and security technologies. Right from the build, test, deployment, and monitoring of a product, the engineer integrates all resources and functions required at every stage of the product lifecycle while protecting the cloud architecture from hacking attacks. In addition, the engineer is involved in team composition, project activities, and defining and setting the processes for CI/CD pipelines and external interfaces. 

DevOps Roles: Release Manager

When it comes to the DevOps team structure, the release manager holds one of the most demanding and stressful roles. The release manager is responsible for the entire release lifecycle, from planning to scheduling to automating and managing continuous delivery environments. Release managers are a DevOps role mostly Ops-focused, wherein they design an automation pipeline for a smooth progression of code to production, monitor feedback and reports, and plan the next release, working in an endless loop. 

DevOps Roles: DevOps/CloudOps architect

The responsibility of a DevOps architect is to analyze existing software development processes and create an optimized DevOps CI/CD pipeline to rapidly build and deliver software. The architect analyses existing processes and implements best practices to streamline and automate processes using the right tools and technologies. In addition, he monitors and manages technical operations, collaborates with dev and ops, and offers support when required. He also acts as a leader as required.

Watch this video to succeed in DevOps by adopting the Cloud Native architecture practice.

DevOps roles: Security and Compliance Engineer

The Security and Compliance Engineer (SCE) is responsible for the overall security of the DevOps environment. The SCE closely works with the development teams to design and integrate security into the CI/CD pipeline, ensuring data integrity and security are not compromised at every stage of the product lifecycle. In addition, the SCE ensures that the products being developed are adhering to governing regulations and compliance standards. 

DevOps roles: Software Developer/Tester  

While a regular software developer writes the code to build a product, the DevOps software developer/tester is involved across the product lifecycle. DevOps roles and Responsibilities include tasks such as updating the code, adding new features, and resolving bugs while ensuring that the application meets business objectives. In addition, the developer runs unit tests, pushes the code to production, and monitors its performance. 

DevOps roles: DevOps evangelist

For an organization to fully leverage DevOps, it should go through a complete cultural shift. A DevOps evangelist is the one who acts as this change agent, inspiring, educating, and motivating people across the organization to embark on the DevOps journey.

The evangelist leads the DevOps journey, ensuring that a cultural shift is happening across the organization, everyone is aware of their roles and responsibilities, finds ways to optimize processes and ensures that best practices are implemented in an end-to-end product development lifecycle. 

The roles of a DevOps engineer and a Software engineer are not the same, but their tasks may overlap, and they can work together to provide better client results.

If you are interested in outsourcing DevOps engineers, read our blog Top IT Outsourcing Companies in LATAM to make the right decision

 Improve your software development process with the best DevOps Consulting services

How to Increase Efficiency in DevOps Teams?

While many organizations focus on tools and technologies, people and culture are ignored. However, choosing the right people for the right tasks and inducing the DevOps culture across the organization delivers results in the long run. 

Retention of valuable resources

DevOps teams are special. They work within a unique culture. As such, organizations should focus more on retaining existing employees instead of recruiting new ones. Organizations generally incur significant costs in training new employees and integrating resources across teams.

However, identifying potential talent and building new DevOps teams would be a good idea. Not only is it cost-effective, but the knowledge they possess and share with others will be an added advantage. 

Providing the right tools, engaging them on visionary projects,and working under competent management and quality people are some aspects that will help you retain your employees. 

Cross-functional teams/ squads

In a traditional software development environment, developers and operations people have different objectives, incentives, and responsibilities. While developers are rewarded for the feature-set, operations receive incentives when the infrastructure is stable. As such, developers are not concerned about stability while operations teams don’t like frequent code changes.

To overcome this challenge, you should customize your DevOps team structure with cross-functional teams comprising designers, developers, testers, security professionals, and operations members who share incentives and responsibilities. Now, every member of the cross-functional team will take equal responsibility at every stage of the product lifecycle. 

Planned recruitment

Create a hiring strategy based on industry trends, technological analysis, and business requirements. Prepare a structured process management system with a streamlined interview process and onboard mechanisms and execute it to hire the right people for the right jobs, at the right time.

Soft skills are the most important requirement in a DevOps team structure. Compared to technical skills, soft skills are more complex to teach your employees. So, ensure that your employees are creative thinkers and team persons, communicate well, and are ready to learn. More than speaking, they should listen and translate the information into actionable insights.

We can help you automate your applications and reduce your costs! Know about our DevOps Outsourcing Services!

Best Practices to Succeed as a DevOps Team

Now that you know the DevOps roles and responsibilities. You need to customize your DevOps strategies

• Choose the right talent: After acquiring the right talent, organize your teams across customer value streams. Start with smaller teams and scale up.
• Allow each team to choose its tools: Processes autonomously while maintaining a shared tool strategy and centralized visibility and monitoring. 
• Seamless communication: Across the organization cannot be ignored. Using the right chat tools and communication tools is recommended.
• Alert escalation and incident management tools: Play a handy role in helping members receive timely alerts and keep themselves updated with what’s happening across the infrastructure. They can integrate monitoring tools and share a common workflow. I
• Deal with members individually: Regular pep talks, motivations, and inspirations would boost members’ morale, which would significantly impact the system’s overall productivity. 
• New DevOps metrics gaining adoption in 2025 include Mean Time to Restore (MTTR), Deployment Frequency, Change Failure Rate, and Developer Experience Index (DXI).

Watch our video to learn how effective communication impacts your development team.

What would be the best DevOps practices to automate, optimize, and monitor the entire Software Development life cycle? Read the blog!

DevOps is not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ method. Each organization has different DevOps requirements and perspectives. Because of the lack of standards and policies, organizations should take extra care in preparing and implementing a DevOps team structure and strategy. 

Start at the organization level and hire and manage the right talent required. Work at the team level, designing and structuring your processes, defining roles and responsibilities of DevOps teams, and choosing the right technology stack. Then go down to the individual level to touch every member of the team. The secret to success in a DevOps environment is gaining top-down buy-in across the organization. 

Overall, DevOps practitioners’ responsibilities revolve around fostering a culture of agility, rapid iteration, and delivering customer value by aligning development and operations goals. The bottom line is that DevOps is not just for developers or operations; it’s for the entire organization.

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DevOps Team FAQs