Wanna work in DevOps? Here are the skills these startups look for

by John Siegel
November 21, 2017

Inter-departmental communications can make or break a company. And while most startup employees wear multiple hats, there’s one team whose job description mandates it: the DevOps team. Whether it’s developing a roadmap for the company’s product or streamlining operations by introducing new technologies and processes, the DevOps team is often the department to thank.

With this in mind, we asked three tech companies to describe their ideal candidate as they build out their growing DevOps teams. Here’s what they had to say.

 

SteelHouse Culver City AdTech Startup
Image via SteelHouse

Headquartered in Culver City’s Hayden Tract, adtech startup SteelHouse develops a marketing platform that offers businesses access to the tools they need to plan and launch a marketing campaign. As the landscape continues to develop, it’s up to the DevOps team to plan and launch new capabilities. According to DevOps lead Aiman Parvaiz, the ability to identify potential roadblocks before they’re reached is just one of the traits they look for in a DevOps professional.

What are some of the tasks DevOps team members at Steelhouse are responsible for?

The DevOps team at SteelHouse is responsible for ensuring each team has the right tools needed to perform at their best. We strive to empower them through the development of custom tooling, or using OSS like Sensu, Prometheus and Terraform, among others.

Automation is key at SteelHouse, so anything we may end up doing more than once is usually put down in code and automated to make it easier in the future.

What sort of experience stands out to you for the role?

The scale at which SteelHouse operates, combined with the vast breadth of technology needed to support it, makes for a unique challenge and opportunity. We deal with hundreds of millions of requests each day, and it’s an interesting challenge to sustain, improve and grow an already high traffic environment. If you’re familiar with and excited by that type of scenario, it will definitely help you stand out.

What are some of the technical skills that are mandatory for the position?

We not only look for technical skills but ethics as well in an individual. They also need to be able to adapt; technology is evolving so rapidly that it’s important to be open to learning new stuff, and doing it quickly. In addition to experience setting up scalable solutions, some of the technical skills we require experience with AWS, container orchestration (Kubernetes, preferably), Terraform, Ansible, Python and Bash.

 

Nativo adtech startup
Image via Nativo

El Segundo-based Nativo offers publishers and media companies an integrated native stack to help them sell and optimize ads while also providing a non-interruptive experience. Rich Horace, director of DevOps, said when it comes to his team, the importance of possessing a deep understanding of what the company offers its clients cannot be understated.

What are some of the tasks DevOps team members at Nativo are responsible for?

Being part of the DevOps team, team members assist with server provision and configuration management, while being in more of a tech ops environment (production). The team also manages the release cycle with developers, work on internal DevOps projects and assist with any other operational tasks.

What sort of experience stands out to you for the role?

As a team, we look for individuals that do things beyond deployment and configuration management. What’s beyond that you might ask? Having a greater understanding of the business is always crucial. Having the ability to write scripts and do mini projects are always great things to feature on your resume. At Nativo, we want to make sure we find gems that will help us move the company forward.

What are some of the technical skills that are mandatory for the position?

AWS, Linux, Script, Bash and Python are always great skills to know in DevOps.

 

Bridg West LA adtech startup
Image via Bridg

Bridg is a West LA-based startup using artificial intelligence and big data to help restaurants and retailers identify who their customers are and what they want. For CTO Rony Sawdayi, working on the DevOps team requires a diverse skill set, but when it comes down to it, the ability to learn and adapt on the fly is vital for a DevOps professional.

What are some of the tasks DevOps team members at Bridg are responsible for?

The DevOps team at Bridg is responsible for a number of tasks. They design and implement AWS solutions for continuous deployment and delivery, infrastructure provisioning monitoring and alerting. They also collaborate directly with the engineering team to define strategy and technical infrastructure roadmap, and drive the rapid implementation of appropriate technologies. Our DevOps are always evaluating new tools and technologies to drive automation of processes, cost effectiveness, security and reliability.

What sort of experience stands out to you for the role?

We’re looking for individuals who are well-versed in continuous integration, deployment and management. A comfortability with learning and using the latest in advanced technologies is very important for this type of position. Our ideal candidate is someone who is familiar with building tools to automate infrastructure provisioning and software deployment, and someone who implements best practices for user account management and security.

What are some of the technical skills that are mandatory for the position?

Amazon AWS: EC2, ELB,  ECS, IAM, RDS, Elasticsearch, CloudWatch, CloudFormation, Kafka, microservices, MongoDB, Hive, Presto

 

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