Hire a full-time DevOps engineer. AWS, Azure or GCP, tested on a real pipeline.
One person who owns how your code gets to production: the pipeline, the infrastructure, the access and the alerts, with every step written down.
$3,500 a month, salary included. 2–3 vetted profiles in about two weeks.
What a DevOps & cloud engineer owns, day to day.
CI/CD
Tests and builds on every pull request, staging on merge, production after an approval.
Infrastructure as code
Terraform for what runs in AWS, Azure or GCP, so nothing lives only in a console.
Rollback in one command
Documented, and tried before the day it’s needed.
Secrets and access
No long-lived keys, least privilege, and the rotation written down.
Failing deploys
The root cause from the logs, then the fix that keeps it from coming back.
Costs and alerts
Budgets, alerts that mean something, and idle resources switched off.
How we test a DevOps & cloud engineer.
A take-home test on AWS + GitHub Actions: about 2.5 hours of work, graded by an engineer. Rebuilt for Azure (Container Apps, Azure DevOps) or GCP (Cloud Run) when that’s your cloud.
Part 1, about 90 min
Ship a service through CI/CD
A small service: a GitHub Actions pipeline, Terraform for ECS Fargate or App Runner, no long-lived keys, a better Dockerfile.
What passes Tests, a staging step and a one-command rollback.
Part 2, about 30 min
Debug a failing deploy
From the logs alone: the root cause, the fix, how to stop it recurring, and a rotation runbook of ten lines or fewer.
What passes Found an expired secret and documented the rotation.
Part 3, about 30 min
Access for a new hire, then remove it
A contractor joins Monday and leaves in 90 days: Microsoft 365, read-only production logs, staging deploys only, the GitHub repo.
What passes Least privilege, every step written down.
Then, live
An interview with an engineer
They walk us through their work. We ask:
Deploys take 25 minutes. What would you measure before changing anything?
And one change, made live: block production deploys late on Fridays without breaking the rollback.
Scorecard · DevOps & cloud engineer
ExampleProfile A
Engineer’s scorecard
- AWS or Azure
- CI/CD
- Docker & Terraform
- Microsoft 365
“Measures before changing anything and leaves a clear trail.”
Watch: More AWS than Azure. Would ramp up on Azure specifics.
AWS + GitHub Actions · Graded by an engineer
Every profile you get comes with one, plus what they built and a short intro video in English.
Who gets through, and who doesn’t.
Must-haves
- AWS, Azure or GCP in production (the one you run)
- CI/CD with GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or Azure DevOps
- Docker and Terraform
- Identity and access: IAM, SSO, least privilege
- Runbooks and changes written down
Red flags we screen out
- Bigger machines as the first answer to slow deploys
- Long-lived access keys in CI
- Changes made by hand in the console, undocumented
- Skipping the tests to make the pipeline faster
- No rollback plan
The seniority this price buys
For $3,500 a month, salary included, a solid mid-level to senior DevOps engineer for a 5 to 50 person company: one or two products, a cloud account to keep tidy, pipelines to own and access to manage.
Not a platform team, or a security architect for a regulated environment. If your job needs that, we’ll say so on the call.
Mostly laptops, Microsoft 365 and access for a small office? That’s an IT support specialist
$3,500 a month. Salary included.
No placement fee, and nothing to pay until their first day. If they aren’t the right fit, we replace them at no cost, with a full handover.
Part-time or a set number of hours? Ask us on a call.
Today
A 30-minute call. You tell us the role and the stack.
In about two weeks
2–3 vetted profiles. The time goes into an engineer testing each one on your stack.
In week three
The person you pick starts, full-time on your team.
Questions
Something else? Ask us on a call
Which clouds do you test?
The one you run. The test is written for AWS with GitHub Actions and rebuilt for Azure or GCP when that’s your stack.
Will they be on call?
They work full-time on your hours. If you need after-hours coverage, tell us on the call, so it’s part of the role and agreed before anyone starts.
Can they also handle IT for our office?
Some can, and the test checks it: onboarding and offboarding in Microsoft 365 is one of its three parts. If IT is most of the job, hire an IT support specialist instead.
What does a full-time DevOps engineer cost?
$3,500 a month for a full-time hire, salary included. No placement fee, and nothing to pay until their first day. Need part-time or a set number of hours? Ask us and we’ll quote it.
Tell us what your DevOps & cloud engineer would own. We’ll take it from there.
$3,500/month per hire. Nothing to pay until their first day.