We're hiring for an engineer whose primary background is in operations and systems administration rather than application development. The role will involve building and maintaining cloud infrastructure, infrastructure as code, Kubernetes, Ansible, automation, and some SRE-related work such as improving monitoring and alerting. There may also be projects involving platform engineering and general systems operations, but the main focus is infrastructure ownership. Our current title, "DevOps / Platform Engineer," is attracting many developers with only limited cloud experience. What job title and description would best communicate that we're looking for an operations-focused engineer who uses modern development practices and tooling?
5 Answers
“Cloud Engineer” or “Infrastructure Engineer” may be the clearest options. Titles like DevOps, Platform Engineer, and SRE overlap heavily between companies, so the title alone probably won’t prevent applications from developers with only application-level cloud experience. Make the operational focus explicit in the first few lines of the posting and filter for it during screening.
You may be describing a broad “DevOps Engineer” role, but it’s also a fairly extensive skill set. DevOps, platform engineering, cloud operations, and SRE are often separate jobs in larger organizations. If one person is expected to cover all of them, be clear about which responsibilities are core, which are secondary, and what level of experience is genuinely required. Otherwise, candidates may reasonably interpret the posting in very different ways.
I’d consider “Infrastructure Engineer” or “Systems Engineer — Cloud and Automation.” If you want the word sysadmin included, something like “Cloud Systems Administrator” could work, but explain that the role uses Terraform, Kubernetes, Ansible, CI/CD, and other modern infrastructure tooling. That makes it clear you’re not describing traditional desktop or Windows administration.
The title matters less than a very specific description. State that the person’s background should be primarily in systems, networking, cloud operations, or infrastructure—not application development. List concrete ownership areas such as Terraform-based IaC, Kubernetes administration, cloud networking and IAM, Linux systems, automation, incident troubleshooting, and observability. You’ll still receive broad applications, but the requirements will make the intended profile much clearer.
The responsibilities sound closest to an operations-focused SRE or cloud infrastructure engineer, but SRE can imply ownership of reliability targets and an on-call rotation. If there’s no on-call responsibility, I’d avoid making SRE the primary title and use it in the responsibilities or preferred-experience section instead.
That matches our situation. We want the monitoring and alerting side of SRE, but the core job is building and maintaining cloud infrastructure, and there’s no on-call rotation.