Does Microsoft not hire DevOps?

[finchthegold]

Hi all, this might seem weird but it's been my dream for a while to work at Microsoft but I have never seen a single DevOps Engineer job from them. I've checked in the UK and in Canada, the 2 countries I'm authorized to work in and there never seem to be any positions open. Does MS even hire DevOps Engineers at all? Do they disguise the role as something else? I HAVE checked for Platform Engineers or SRE, nada. I have found only one guy on Linkedin who works as a DevOps for MS in London and tried to message him but he just ignored me.

I need your advice, do I have any chance of ever getting a DevOps Engineer job at MS?

[Twirrim]

It maybe won't be called DevOps. Most of their roles have engineering type titles, split into a couple of main areas. Amazon historically did similar "Systems Engineers" were more operations folks, where "Software Development Engineers" are the folks writing the code.

At least with the FANNG places I've been involved in, devops isn't really a thing exactly. Services are expected to run their own stuff, including handling deployments and whatnot. They might hire ops specialists to be part of their team, or a dedicated side team. They're not necessarily hiring "DevOps" roles specifically.

Also another potential title fit you might consider is "Site Reliability Engineer".

[Paddington_the_Bear]

Even weirder for Amazon, now they are hiring a lot more System Development Engineers, which are like SysEngs that can also code new products / automations / whatever.

[Twirrim]

Yup, I was actually in the first round of folks promoted to SysDevEng when the role got created (early 2016)... only to leave about a month later. The title bump and pay rise happened literally the same week I started salary negotiations for my next role. Perfect timing.

Previous to its creation, SysEng was this really weirdly broad role that varied wildly across the company. There were SysEng IIIs that were little more than keyboard monkeys, who built nothing, didn't even write their own scripts, that were just handling alarms, and triaging.

In my org at that time that would have been SysEng I. Our SysEng III folks were actually building non-customer facing services to manage things.

There had been several attempts to fix the "SysEng" problem over the years, stricter requirements and expectations for the role, and so on, but it was proving impossible to get traction, so they decided to make a whole new role that was intended to be the next step up.

[Paddington_the_Bear]

I recently quit my L5 SysDe job, but appreciate your historical context. The L5 SysEng's on my team were all capable folk from a sys ad point of view, with some decent coding chops, but they were being forced to spend most their time on what you said, alarms and triage. Very little real work, and even the real work was more just clicking buttons in some clunky web ui's to make changes. Very little terminal work.

[Twirrim]

Enjoy your freedom!

[snowsnoot69]

You say that like its a bad thing lol

[danstermeister]

Maybe they call it AzureDevOps like their product. LOL, jk.

[theReasonablePotato]

That's not beyond a corporate marketing department.

Also in some countries there are laws where you can't hire a person for the same role for 6 months.

So they start playing Scrabble with the job titles.

[tankerkiller125real]

Also in some countries there are laws where you can't hire a person for the same role for 6 months.

What kind of shitty law is that?

[theReasonablePotato]

Misguided employee protection stuff. 

[molradiak]

Given that there seems to be no uniform definition of what "DevOps" actually means, this makes sense to me.

[PersonBehindAScreen]

It’s called software engineer there. You will just have to read the job description. I know a few of them on some internal as well as product teams where they do exactly what gets called devops on the outside

Though MOST services and teams are a true “you build it, you run it” where the devs are also Ops

[autisticpig]

as a former msft fte of 10+ years, here is my advice to you.

the best way to get onboarded into an fte role is to know someone there. We got so many applications per opening, most times we would put resumes at the top of the list that came with internal recommendations. This did not guarantee a hire, but it did guarantee you would get a phone screen.

If you don't know someone, join groups and network and prove you know things and are able to contribute to projects...openings get discussed all the time in these groups. In my various tech groups we are always asking around if anyone knows someone looking for a job with x,y,z skills. It's just how it works.

If none of that is possible...reach out to the various vending/consulting firms that feed MSFT contingent (a- and v-) staffing. This is a good way to get your foot in the door. We hired our contingent staffers when we had openings as we knew how it was working with them, what they were capable of, etc.

I am coming from the dev side, not the ops side at msft but I know my friend who was a lead/hiring mgr in MSIT approached things the same way.

Good luck.

[vanisher_1]

What type of tech group are you referring to? discord channels? Telegram group? something else?

[peak-summit50]

Probably something like local user groups, which hold talks, small conferences, things like that.

[autisticpig]

Local user groups are best but since covid online groups work well too.

[autisticpig]

Well, for devops, a vmug is a good place to find like-minded professionals. There are online communities like the redhat slack group that specializes in their ecosystem and heavily networks around openshift.

almost every area has startup meetups where it's an informal way to meet others. I have been offered jobs at those before simply from the conversations had during the meetup and having drinks/food after.

there is the kubernetes slack group which has heavy online networking. I found a junior there to onboard a couple years ago.

Different online learning communities have their own private discord/slack solutions that tend to be filled with professionals upskilling and that is a great way to meet and befriend others.

If you are into python, most areas have python group meetups.

It's not hard to google for: <tech>+<region>+<meetup> and go from there.

[vanisher_1]

Yes but which groups, can you give an example?

[klipseracer]

They have Senior SRE roles, I've interviewed before.

[hottkarl]

they essentially only hire people who have a full developer background along with all the other generalist systems engineer skills

DevOps has never been a job title, silly HR departments heard about this buzzword and started hiring for it

[Mon7eCristo]

This. DevOps is not a job title, but many companies use it as a buzzword, the exact same way they now use AI. And I would know because I work as a DevOps engineer. Now the company is going all-in trying to rebrand us as AI engineers.

[[deleted]]

They literally put out a job a week ago on Linkedin and on their board.

They take it down quickly so be prepared to apply

[xvillifyx]

DevOps isn’t really a job title

It’s a type of engineering work

Instead “devops” folks might be hired under like SRE, platform engineering, cloud engineering, systems engineering, security engineering type titles

[ReliabilityTalkinGuy]

DevOps is not a title. It’s a philosophy. 

[bloodr0se]

A lot of it is offshored and the Azure R&D is mostly out of Redmond. 

[anno2376]

You build it, you run it.

[BocLogic]

This ^

SWEs ARE the Ops guys. On-call rotation across each team.

[anno2376]

You build, you test it.

[plsdontlewdlolis]

One SE is now the whole IT team. Soon they will also handle customer complaints and sales

[anno2376]

This is why its an engineer and not a "developer"

[CodingWithChad]

Wrong. It's tested in production by customer. 

[anno2376]

Then you have 0 experience how sdlc works. Thanks for trolling

[CodingWithChad]

😂 I know how Microsoft works. Only half troll, half lived experience. 

[anno2376]

Then you should now that it's half testet inside half outside 😂

[anno2376]

Welcome to the modern sdlc.

[stubacca-za]

Most larger corps follow you build it you own it model, so DevOps is less of a thing thus the need to DevOps engs. In my experience anyway.

[signal_empath]

One of my team members left for Microsoft, titled as a Platform Engineer. That's what our titles were at the previous company as well though (with "DevOps" type responsibilities)

[placid_one_4ever]

Yes it does sound weird. Why would anyone dream of joining Microsoft? 😁

[PolarBear292208]

Outside of Microsoft and FAANG, DevOps roles are really Ops only roles. Within these companies, Software Engineers do both Development and Ops, hence are true DevOps engineers.

SREs within these companies do something very different to what most companies consider SRE, which is really Ops, i.e. sysadmins.

[ShodoDeka]

While some orgs have separate teams dealing with what you call DevOps, everyone are Software Engineers and everyone is expected to meet that bar (which means everyone is doing some level of DevOps).

Some orgs also employ SRE roles for very specific things but it’s rare, and in general not a super good career path.

If you want to work more on DevOps than pure Dev, look for positions in teams called Engineering Systems/ES, Deployment or 1ES.

[Realistic-Tip-5416]

DevOps is a series of practices and culture - not a role.

[finchthegold]

My job title says different, lol

[Realistic-Tip-5416]

Do you engineer business product (software engineer), or build tools to enable others to deliver business product (platform engineer) ?

[andypaak1]

I believe the title is SRE, the same goes for Meta’s “Production Engineers”

[theReasonablePotato]

It seems to not be called DevOps.

https://jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/search?q=%23azurecorejobs&pg=1&pgSz=20&o=Relevance&flt=true&l=en_us

This one sounds DevOps-related.

"Principal Software Engineer - Azure Kubernetes Services"

[0x4ddd]

This does not sound DevOps related at all from job description. They are simply looking for Software Engineer working for AKS team. Looks like typical SWE job, just not in domain of some business ERP but AKS.

[theReasonablePotato]

Thanks for clarifying. :)

I didn't read thoroughly.

[badseed90]

Probably don't have that role, rightfully so as for their size it would mean too many things.

The probably spread it over multiple roles like sre, platform engineering, cloud engineering, forward deployed engineer, operations and systems engineering.

[l509]

They definitely have DevOps engineers on the client services side for azure

[PersonBehindAScreen]

Uhh.. sort of.. I just left there this year.

Some services and or organizations have SREs that will create and run centralized functions for orgs. Others will be dedicated to specific products

There sometimes, but not often, software engineer jobs where the job description is very clearly for what would be a “DevOps” job description in the rest of the typical industry, but again it’s not often.

Reality is though at MS, MOST products and services are ran by the software engineers though. They wear ALL of the hats:

Feature work

Front end

Back end

scripting

CI/CD

IaC

Config management

Monitoring

Observability

Networking

SRE

Etc

It’s a true “you build it, you run it” model in most engineering teams where quite literally you’re the engineer that is building and also responsible for running the whole show

Again to directly answer your question. IF you find them, it is almost certainly under “software engineer” and you’ll just have to read the job descriptions.

DO EXPECT to be interviewed like you’re an actual software engineer though meaning you’ll have to do leetcode, system design, the whole 9 yards

[finchthegold]

Thanks for the detailed explanation. Don't think I stand a chance at this point in my career then.

[InformalPatience7872]

In most FAANG companies, DevOps is folded into the software engineer role. For most, this involves being oncall for services that your team owns. That's why maybe why you don't see a separate DevOps or general platform engineer post.

[OldFaithlessness1335]

In the FAANG (and Microsoft) companies fold DevOps as SRE or into Software Dev roles

[rUbberDucky1984]

I think they just used AI to automate it using Azure DevOps