Hire DevOps Engineers

Infrastructure as Code comes first. A senior DevOps engineer structures Terraform into reusable modules with remote, locked state and separate environments, or uses Bicep where a team is standardised on Azure. Ask how they handle drift, import resources that were created by hand, and review a plan before apply - and how secrets stay out of state files and repositories.

CI/CD and Kubernetes are the next layer. Look for pipelines that build once and promote the same artifact through environments, run tests and security scans as gates, and support rollbacks or progressive delivery. On Kubernetes, a strong candidate can talk through resource requests and limits, health probes, autoscaling, network policies, Helm or Kustomize packaging, and GitOps tools that keep clusters in sync with a repository.

Finally, check observability and cost control. Good engineers instrument services with metrics, logs and traces - often via OpenTelemetry - define alerts on symptoms users actually feel rather than on every CPU spike, and write runbooks for the alerts they create. They also treat cloud spend as an engineering metric: tagging resources, right-sizing instances and node pools, scheduling non-production environments off-hours, and choosing reserved or spot capacity where the workload allows.

The first weeks are usually an audit: mapping how code reaches production today, which infrastructure exists only in a console, where secrets live, how backups are tested and what alerts fire. That inventory typically uncovers quick wins - a manual deployment step that can be scripted, an over-provisioned database, a missing restore test - and builds the trust needed for larger changes.

After the audit, responsibilities typically move to codifying infrastructure into Terraform or Bicep, standardising pipelines across services, setting up dashboards and actionable alerts, and documenting incident response. By the end of the first quarter you should expect repeatable environments, a deployment path any developer can use safely, and a clear view of where cloud spend goes.

Project-based delivery fits a defined change with a clear end state: moving from manual deployments to CI/CD, containerising an application and moving it to Kubernetes, codifying an existing cloud estate, or a cost-reduction review. A dedicated DevOps engineer fits a platform that keeps evolving - frequent releases, many services, compliance requirements - where someone must own the pipelines and infrastructure over time.

Many teams combine the two: a project to establish the foundation, then dedicated capacity to run and improve it. Whichever you choose, pricing is transparent and milestone-based, the client owns all code, infrastructure definitions and IP, and an NDA is signed before kickoff and before any cloud credentials are shared.

Use a hands-on exercise close to your environment. A good format is a small repository with a containerised service: ask the candidate to write a pipeline that builds, tests and deploys it, plus Terraform or Bicep for the supporting resources, and to explain how they would roll back a bad release. Watch for least-privilege access, secrets handling and whether they test their own changes.

Pair that with an incident walkthrough. Describe a realistic outage - a pod stuck in a crash loop after a config change, or a sudden jump in cloud spend - and ask how they would investigate, what signals they would look at first and what they would change afterwards to prevent a repeat. Calm, methodical reasoning and blameless follow-up are as important as tool knowledge.