DevOps Team roles and responsibilities focus on bridging the gap between development and operations to create 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).
By 2026, many organizations have also integrated Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and Platform Engineers into their DevOps teams to enhance system reliability and developer productivity further
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.
By 2026, DevOps teams also leverage AI-driven operations (AIOps) and enhanced observability practices to enable faster feedback loops and proactive issue resolution
A DevOps team is structured as a cross-functional unit that brings together members from development, IT operations, quality assurance, and security. Rather than silos, all these roles work in unison on a shared goal: fast, continuous delivery of software.
Each role has a clear place: for example, developers and testers build and validate code, while ops engineers and SREs manage deployment and reliability. A DevOps Evangelist or lead coordinates across the group to drive DevOps principles.
The exact team composition can vary by organization size. Still, the core idea is to include all the skill sets needed to take an idea from code to production within a single collaborative team.
Read our blog on SRE vs DevOps
DevOps teams are ideally led by a senior member of the organization who understands business processes, possesses the necessary technical expertise, and communicates effectively with all employees.
In a DevOps environment, cross-functional teams share common responsibilities. Here are some of the DevOps team’s responsibilities:
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD):
Build phase:
Test phase:
Release phase:
Deployment phase:
Serverless CI/CD platforms:
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.
In 2026, 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.
Cloud technology in DevOps:
Traditional monolithic architectures:
Microservices approach:
Cloud architecture integration:
Cloud-native stacks:
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.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an innovative approach to managing infrastructure operations through 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.
Capabilities:
Companion Practices:
Why it matters in 2026:
I recommend this blog about Infrastructure as code, which discusses its benefits!
Companion Practices
Why It Matters in 2026
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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.
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This is one of the top DevOps Trends teams should follow; read the full blog to learn more.
When culture is deeply rooted in an organization, resistance to change is a significant bottleneck. As DevOps is not just a tool or a technology, it is essential 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 a business perspective, encompassing deployment and maintenance across all stakeholders, departments, and stages of development.
With various tools, technologies, processes, and personnel, achieving this is a Herculean task. It only happens when everyone adopts this change, practices it, and evangelizes the concept. DevOps leader holds a key role in this responsibility.
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 confined to production environments; 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
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 notify the support team of known errors.
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 minimize errors and accelerate app development.
On-call Incident management is not very different in DevOps environments. The only change is that developers are also involved in this process. T
eams 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.
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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.
The Release Manager is a critical DevOps role responsible for the entire software release lifecycle. They plan release timelines, configure CI/CD pipelines for deployment, and coordinate with teams to ensure each software release is smooth and on schedule.
In a DevOps team, this role is demanding because it sits at the intersection of development and operations, ensuring rapid yet reliable releases.
The responsibility of a DevOps architect is to analyze existing software development processes and create an optimized DevOps CI/CD pipeline to build and deliver software rapidly.
The architect analyses existing processes and implements best practices to streamline and automate processes using the right tools and technologies. Additionally, he monitors and manages technical operations, collaborates with development and operations teams, and provides support as needed. He also acts as a leader as required.
Watch this video to succeed in DevOps by adopting the Cloud Native architecture practice.
The Security and Compliance Engineer (SCE) is responsible for the overall security of the DevOps environment.
The SCE closely collaborates with development teams to design and integrate security into the CI/CD pipeline, ensuring that 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.
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.
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.
An MLOps Engineer bridges the gap between data science and DevOps. They build and maintain automated pipelines for data preparation, model training, validation, and deployment, ensuring that ML models transition smoothly from development to production.
This engineer also monitors model performance in production (looking for issues like model drift) and works closely with data scientists to roll out updates. In short, the MLOps Engineer brings DevOps principles to the machine learning lifecycle, enabling reliable and continuous delivery of AI-powered features.
An AIOps Engineer focuses on leveraging artificial intelligence in IT operations. This role designs and integrates ML-driven monitoring and alerting systems that automatically detect anomalies, predict outages or performance issues, and trigger preventive actions.
By utilizing AI for log analysis, anomaly detection, and predictive analytics, the AIOps Engineer enables the team to resolve incidents more quickly (or even prevent them) and optimize resource utilization.
In essence, they augment the traditional Ops/SRE functions with smart automation, improving uptime, efficiency, and insight into complex systems.
The Prompt Engineer is a newer specialty that has emerged with the rise of advanced AI models (like GPT-4 and other large language models).
This professional crafts, tests, and refines prompts and queries to ensure AI systems produce accurate and useful outputs aligned with business requirements. In a DevOps team context, a Prompt Engineer might work with developers and data scientists to integrate AI capabilities into applications or internal tools, fine-tuning the AI’s responses and reducing errors or “hallucinations.”
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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.
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 in visionary projects, and working under competent management and quality people are some aspects that will help you retain your employees.
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.
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.
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Now that you know the DevOps roles and responsibilities. You need to customize your DevOps strategies
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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In a DevOps environment, there is no hierarchy. Developers, operations, and QA teams work at the same level. As such, each team works independently and does not belong to any other team.
DevOps team builds a feedback loop with all stakeholders early in the cycle to establish seamless communication throughout the product lifecycle via product meetings, daily standups, planning meetings, etc, using various digital communication channels.
Before hiring a DevOps engineer, assess your business requirements and prepare a hiring strategy. A DevOps engineer is skilled in development and operations and interacts with all team members. So, look for complex skills such as IT background, virtualization expertise, system knowledge, etc., and soft skills such as communication, service orientation, team person, and the value he offers to the organization.
Firstly, for task management, set up a central task board using Kanban or Scrum so that everyone knows what is happening around them.
Secondly, collaboration is essential across the infrastructure so members can ask questions, share things, and keep everyone updated on the progress. Thirdly, establish an agile reporting toolset so that all stakeholders to monitor the project.
Choosing the right agile tools, educating stakeholders, assigning them specific roles, and collaborating with everyone using Kanban/Scrum boards is recommended.
The Ops team should bring extensible automation to operations so that regular tasks such as scaling the infrastructure, updating systems, or resolving issues can be done more smartly. It also brings consistency across the infrastructure and enables easy tracking of KPIs.
While the team operates autonomously most of the time, it will report to a pre-assigned senior member of the organization, ideally a DevOps evangelist, when required.
There is no one-size-fits-all size for a DevOps team, it depends on your organization’s scale and needs. What matters is having all critical skills represented.
Small companies might have a 3–5 person DevOps team where individuals wear multiple hats (e.g., one engineer handling both infrastructure and CI/CD).
Larger organizations might have dedicated roles (DevOps engineers, SREs, QA, security, etc.) spanning 10+ members. The focus should be on cross-functional collaboration rather than a specific headcount
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