How to Hire a DevOps or Cloud Engineer in Australia

Oct 14

3 min read

Every software team relies on infrastructure. A strong DevOps or cloud engineer keeps releases fast and systems steady. Weak infrastructure shows up as outages, slow deploys and engineers who lose days to tooling. This guide covers how to define the role, what to look for and how to find the right person.

Define the role first

The titles overlap. Decide which work you need most:

DevOps: build and deploy pipelines, environments and release process.
Cloud engineer: design and run your setup on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.
Site reliability engineer: uptime, monitoring and incident response.
Platform engineer: internal tools and a paved road for other engineers.

A first infrastructure hire at a startup covers several of these. A hire into an established platform team goes deep in one.

Decide before you hire

Your cloud platform and the tools you use now.
Team size and the number of services you run.
On-call: is there a rota, and how often is the person called out?
Security duties: who owns access, secrets and compliance work?
Location: office, hybrid or remote, and the time zones you cover.

Skills to look for

Infrastructure as code with tools such as Terraform.
Build and release pipelines, and containers.
Monitoring, logging and alerts they set up and trusted.
Incident response: calm work under pressure and clear write-ups after.
Scripting in Python, Go or Bash.
Security basics: access control, secrets and network design.

Clear communication with developers. The best infrastructure engineers make the safe path the easy path.

Ask about an outage they handled. What broke, what did they do first and what changed after?

Where to find candidates

Experienced engineers in this field are employed and approached often. A job ad reaches few of them. Look in these places:

Systems administrators who moved into cloud work.
Software engineers who took ownership of deployment and infrastructure.
Site reliability engineers at larger companies who want a wider role.
Consultancies, for engineers who want to stay with one product.

Say which problems they will own and how much support they get. Be honest about on-call.

How to run the interview

A first call on the role, the stack and the on-call load.
A scenario discussion: a service is down. How does the person find the cause?
A design session: a pipeline or cloud setup for a problem close to yours.
A review of infrastructure code.
A meeting with a developer who relies on the platform.

Move from first interview to offer in three or four weeks. Give feedback after each stage.

Common mistakes

Expecting one person to cover infrastructure, security and support for every team.
Hiding the on-call load until the offer stage.
Hiring for one tool instead of the underlying skills.
Running a slow process while strong candidates take other offers.

Related guides

Hiring for security too? Read how to hire a senior security engineer and red, blue and purple teams explained.

How Staff Hunter helps

Staff Hunter recruits cloud, DevOps and security engineers for startups, scaleups and established businesses in Australia. We find people through direct headhunting. See our software engineering and cyber security recruitment pages, or book a 30-minute call to talk through your role.

Book a 30-minute call