picked.ai/hire/devops-engineer
Hire a devops engineer
How to hire a
devops engineer.
Salary bands, time-to-fill, what good actually looks like, and the assessment we put every candidate through. Built on nine years of validated psychometric data from Neuroworx.
Post this role
~30 seconds
Title, level, three must-haves. We syndicate, screen, score, and shortlist. First 50 candidates free.
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£115,000
Median salary · United Kingdom
£95-£135k senior range
42d
Typical time-to-fill
down to 4.5d with Picked
142
Applicants per role
Series A · public posting
9 / 142
Make it to interview
industry · pre-AI screening
Salary bands
What it costs to hire one.
2026 H1 · base + variable
LevelUSUKEURemote
IC1 / Junior SRE$88-$120k£55-£75k€59-€80k$73-$99k
IC2 / SRE$120-$160k£75-£100k€80-€107k$99-$132k
IC3 / Senior SRE$152-$216k£95-£135k€102-€144k$125-$178k
IC4 / Staff SRE$205-$280k£128-£175k€137-€187k$169-$231k
IC5 / Principal SRE$264-$368k£165-£230k€177-€246k$218-$304k
Source · 2,847 anonymised offers placed via Picked Q4 2025 to Q1 2026. Updated monthly.
What good looks like
Past credentials. Present signals.
01
Reliability instinct
Has paged themselves at 3am to test the alert. Reasons about blast radius before reaching for the deploy button.
02
Cost awareness
Knows what their stack costs per month and can name the top three line items without checking.
03
Comms in incidents
Writes the status update before the postmortem. Keeps the channel calm when the dashboard is red.
04
Tooling taste
Picks the boring tool that the team can operate. Has rejected something shiny in the last six months.
05
Pragmatism
Will ship the bash script today and the proper operator next quarter. Knows which is which.
Nine years of Neuroworx outcome data on 14,000 devops engineer hires says: the candidates rated high on reliability instinct + comms in incidents outperform high-prestige-CV candidates by a wide margin in the first twelve months.
Read the paper →
What Picked puts every candidate through
Four stages. Each one written down.
From the Neuroworx item bank · 1,247 items live
01
Triage
CV + cover screened against must-haves. Title, level, language, region, three skills you set. Hard filters first. The model spends no time on people you would not even read.
~12 seconds · $0.12
02
Conversational screen
A 12-minute voice or chat conversation against six structured probes: motivation, scope of last role, the thing they are proudest of, biggest production mistake, what they would build with a free month, why this role.
~12 min · $0.31
03
Role-fit assessment
A scoped task drawn from the bank. Submit a short writeup. Scored against a published rubric on judgement, craft, and pragmatism.
30-60 min · $0.28
04
AI first-round interview
A 20-minute voice interview against six items drawn from the IC3 item bank. Includes behavioural ("tell me about a time"), technical or scenario ("walk me through how you would approach"), and an ownership probe.
~20 min · $0.24
The 1,247 items for devops engineer are split across 42 sub-rubrics. Every item has been calibrated against twelve-month performance outcomes from 14,083 prior hires.
See sample items ↗
Sample interview questions
A few from the item bank.
01
Tell me about the last incident you were paged for. Walk me from page to resolution.
Listen for: A specific page, the first signal they checked, the false trail they pulled, the actual fix.
02
Show me a runbook you have written. Why did you write it?
Listen for: A runbook that exists because they got paged for it. Concrete first step, named owner, exit criteria.
03
What does your current infra cost per month, and where does most of it go?
Listen for: A real number, a top-three line-item breakdown, the bit they think is wasteful.
04
Describe a deploy that went wrong. What did you change after?
Listen for: The specific mechanism (bad migration, config drift, queue back-pressure). The control they added after.
05
Pick a tool in your stack you would rip out tomorrow. Why?
Listen for: A named tool, a specific failure mode (operator complexity, licence cost, alerting noise). What they would replace it with.
See all 30 questions →
Job description template
Copy. Paste. Replace the bracketed bits.
devops-engineer.md
211 words · 3 min read
# [Senior/Mid/Junior] DevOps engineer · [city] or remote

We are hiring our [Nth] platform engineer. You will own [the deploy pipeline / the on-call rotation / the observability stack] across [N] services. The team is [N] engineers plus a [tech lead / SRE manager]. [How you ship]. [How on-call works].

## You will be good here if

- You have been on the pager for production and have a runbook that proves it.
- You reach for the boring, working tool first.
- [The third trait you actually care about].

## What we use

[Cloud, IaC, orchestrator, observability]. We will not retrain you on a stack, but we do not care if you came from [adjacent stack].

## Compensation

[Currency][low] to [high] base. [low] to [high] percent equity. On-call paid at [rate]. We post the band because we mean it.

## How we hire

30-second post, screen + assessment via Picked, 20-min interview via Picked, one on-site half-day with the team. We aim to give a yes or no in 7 days.

## What is the rubric

Reliability instinct, cost awareness, comms in incidents, tooling taste, pragmatism. Not credentials.

That is the JD. Apply via [link] or just send a paragraph about the last incident you owned.

[Your name], [your title]
Full JD template page →
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Hire devops engineers · Picked.ai