If you've spent any time browsing tech job boards "lately" (by lately, read "in the recent years"), you've probably noticed a bewildering array of similar-sounding positions: Site Reliability Engineer, Cloud Engineer, Platform Engineer, DevOps Engineer and most recently DevSecOps Engineer and the aberration called DevSecFinOps (yes, saw it already twice!).
The lines between these roles seem blurry at best, and completely arbitrary at worst. Let's untangle this mess and address why some of these titles fundamentally misunderstand what DevOps actually is.
The Great DevOps Misconception
Before diving into specific roles, we need to address the elephant in the room: DevOps is not a job title and most companies still don't understand it.
DevOps it's a cultural philosophy, a set of practices, and a movement aimed at breaking down silos between development and operations teams (if you need to convince or educate your manager about it, offer him a copy of the amazing The Phoenix Project this Christmas).
When companies create positions called "DevOps Engineer" or "DevSecOps Engineer," they're essentially missing the forest for the trees.
DevOps emerged as a response to the traditional model where developers threw code "over the wall" to operations teams. It advocates for shared ownership, continuous collaboration, and breaking down artificial barriers.
Creating a "DevOps Engineer" position ironically creates a new silo, the very thing DevOps sought to eliminate. It's like having a position called "Agile Engineer" or "Teamwork Manager."
The Actual Roles: What Do They Really Do?
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
Origin Story: Born at Google, SRE is what happens when you ask software engineers to design operations functions.
Day-to-Day Reality:
- Writing code to eliminate toil (repetitive operational work)
- Defining and defending SLOs (Service Level Objectives)
- Building monitoring and observability systems
- Conducting blameless postmortems
- Balancing feature velocity with reliability through error budgets
- On-call rotations with a focus on reducing incident frequency
Core Philosophy: "Hope is not a strategy." SREs treat operations as a software problem, applying engineering principles to system reliability.
Google published their "handbook" about it, and you can read it online, here
Cloud Engineer
Origin Story: Emerged with the rise of AWS, Azure and GCP as organizations needed specialists who understood cloud-native architectures.
Day-to-Day Reality:
- Designing cloud architectures across multiple services
- Managing cloud costs and optimization
- Implementing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools like Terraform or CloudFormation
- Setting up networking, security groups, and identity management
- Migrating on-premises workloads to cloud
- Staying current with rapidly evolving cloud services
Core Philosophy: "The cloud is someone else's computer, but it's your responsibility." Cloud Engineers are the translators between business needs and cloud capabilities.
Platform Engineer
Origin Story: The newest kid on the block, emerging as organizations realized they needed to productize their internal developer platforms.
Day-to-Day Reality:
- Building internal developer platforms (IDPs)
- Creating golden paths for developers (standardized, supported ways to build and deploy)
- Maintaining CI/CD pipelines as products, not projects
- Building developer self-service portals
- Abstracting infrastructure complexity from developers
- Gathering developer feedback and iterating on platform features
Core Philosophy: "Developers are our customers." Platform Engineers treat internal infrastructure as a product with its own roadmap, user research, and success metrics.
The Overlap: Where Things Get Fuzzy
Here's where it gets interesting: These roles share significant overlap:
Common Skills Across All Three:
- Infrastructure as Code proficiency
- Container orchestration (ECS? EKS? AKS? bare-metal, don't matter)
- CI/CD pipeline design
- Monitoring and observability
- Scripting and automation
- Security best practices
- Cost awareness
The Venn Diagram Reality:
- An SRE at a cloud-native company looks a lot like a Cloud Engineer with strong software skills
- A Platform Engineer often does SRE work for the platform itself
- A Cloud Engineer building developer tools is essentially doing Platform Engineering
The Key Differences: It's About Focus
While the technical skills overlap significantly, the fundamental difference lies in primary focus and stakeholders:
SRE: Focuses on reliability and availability
- Primary metric: Uptime, error budgets, MTTR
- Primary stakeholder: End users who need services to work
Cloud Engineer: Focuses on cloud infrastructure and architecture
- Primary metric: Cost optimization, resource utilization, migration success
- Primary stakeholder: The organization needing cloud capabilities
Platform Engineer: Focuses on developer experience and productivity
- Primary metric: Developer satisfaction, deployment frequency, time to production
- Primary stakeholder: Internal development teams
At my current job I'm happy to see I have a mix of all three roles described above in my day-to-day activities, keeping me updated (and motivated) to continue to work every day a bit better than before.
Why This Matters for Your Career
Understanding these distinctions isn't just semantic nitpicking, it has real implications:
Job Search Strategy: Knowing what each role typically entails helps you target positions that match your interests, even if the title isn't perfect.
Skill Development: You can identify gaps based on where you want to focus. Want to be an SRE? Double down on software engineering and systems thinking. Platform Engineer? Study developer workflows and product management.
Interview Preparation: You can better articulate why you're interested in a specific role and demonstrate understanding of its unique value proposition.
Salary Negotiations: Understanding the market and typical responsibilities helps you negotiate from an informed position.
The Path Forward: Embracing DevOps as a Practice
Instead of creating "DevOps Engineer" positions, organizations should:
- Embed DevOps practices across all engineering roles
- Hire SREs, Platform Engineers, or Cloud Engineers based on actual needs
- Foster collaboration between these roles and development teams
- Measure success through deployment frequency, lead time, MTTR, and change failure rate, not by counting "DevOps Engineers"
Practical Advice for Job Seekers
When you see a "DevOps Engineer" posting, dig deeper:
- Does the job description focus on reliability? It's probably an SRE role
- Heavy emphasis on AWS/Azure/GCP? Likely a Cloud Engineer position
- Building tools for developers? That's Platform Engineering
Don't let imprecise titles deter you from interesting opportunities, but do ask clarifying questions during interviews about the team's actual focus and responsibilities.
Conclusion: It's All About Value Delivery
Whether you call yourself an SRE, Cloud Engineer, or Platform Engineer, the goal remains the same: enabling organizations to deliver value to customers quickly, reliably, and securely. The specific title matters less than understanding your team's mission and how you contribute to it.
DevOps isn't about having the right job title, it's about breaking down silos, automating everything that can be automated, and creating a culture where everyone owns the full lifecycle of their services. The moment we turn it into a job title, we've already lost the plot.
Remember: You don't hire someone to "do DevOps" any more than you hire someone to "do Agile." You hire skilled engineers who understand and practice these philosophies while bringing specific expertise in reliability, cloud infrastructure or platform building.
The next time you see a "DevOps Engineer" job posting, ask yourself: what problem is this company actually trying to solve? The answer will tell you whether it's really an SRE, Cloud Engineer or Platform Engineer role in disguise, and whether the company truly understands the DevOps philosophy or is just chasing buzzwords.
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