Hire DevOps engineers who have carried a pager, not just a pipeline
Centricone places engineers who have operated what they built. The screening covers incident behaviour as well as tooling, because that is the half that shows up on a bad night.
Screening
What we check that a keyword match does not
Every candidate sits a live assessment with an engineer who does this work. For this role, that conversation covers:
- Pipeline design: what they gate on, what they parallelize, and how they roll back
- Infrastructure as code in practice, including how they handle drift and state
- Incident reasoning — what they check first, and how they decide to mitigate versus fix
- Secrets and access handling, which is where the shortcuts usually are
What they do once they are in your team
Building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines your developers can read
Terraform-defined infrastructure under code review
Observability: dashboards, alert routing, and runbooks
On-call participation and postmortems that produce a change
Which level you actually need
Most briefs ask for senior by default. Sometimes that is right; often the work is better served by a mid-level engineer and a clearer specification.
Maintains and extends existing pipelines and infrastructure, with review on anything structural.
Designs the delivery path and infrastructure, and is trusted to make production changes unsupervised.
Owns the platform and the operating model, including on-call practice and cost.
Questions about hiring DevOps engineers
Not sure what you need? Describe the work and we’ll tell you which role fills it.