The DevOps Dilemma Every Growing Company Faces

Imagine this: your startup just closed a major client, and your application traffic doubles. Your servers are struggling, deployments are failing, and your developers are spending more time putting out fires than building features. You know you need DevOps expertise, but should you hire a full-time engineer, build an entire team, or is there a better approach?

I’m Joel Zamboni, and after two decades working in infrastructure and development, I’ve seen many companies face this exact decision. That’s why we built Webera as a DevOps subscription: to provide senior DevOps coverage without the commitment of full-time hires. But I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes building an in-house team is the right call. Let’s break down how to decide.

DevOps engineer salary and what a hire really costs

Before deciding whether to hire a DevOps engineer, it helps to know what you are budgeting for. The salary is only the first line.

Salary. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics does not publish a separate category for DevOps engineers, so there is no single official DevOps engineer salary figure. The two closest occupations it tracks give a useful range:

Software developers had a median annual wage of $135,980 in May 2025.
Network and computer systems administrators had a median annual wage of $99,130 in May 2025.

DevOps work sits between the two: it combines software engineering (pipelines, infrastructure as code, automation) with systems operations (networking, reliability, on-call). Keep in mind that these are national medians across all experience levels and locations. A senior engineer who can own AWS infrastructure, Kubernetes, security and incident response on their own is not a median hire, and in competitive markets you should expect to pay above these figures. Check current offers in your own market before you set a budget.

Junior and entry-level DevOps engineer salary. The BLS does not break wages out by seniority, but the spread in both occupations is wide: in May 2025 the lowest 10 percent of software developers earned less than $82,460, and the lowest 10 percent of network and computer systems administrators less than $62,640. A junior DevOps engineer salary sits toward that end. A junior hire also needs a senior engineer to learn from, so it rarely replaces the senior hire this post is about.

Benefits and overhead. According to the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release, wages and salaries made up 70.0 percent of private industry employers’ compensation costs in June 2026, with benefits making up the remaining 30.0 percent. In other words, an employee’s total cost to the company is well above their salary before you count equipment, training, certifications or recruiting fees.

Time to hire. Specialized senior roles take time to fill. While the search runs, the infrastructure work either waits or lands on your developers.

The second hire. This is the cost most teams miss. One DevOps engineer cannot be on call every night of the year. If production needs 24/7 coverage, you need at least two people sharing the rotation, or you are relying on one person never being sick, on holiday or ready to move on.

Capacity mismatch. DevOps workload fluctuates. Some months bring a migration or a compliance audit; others are steady. A full-time team is sized for the peaks or struggles during them.

As for freelancers: they offer flexibility, but availability varies, quality is hard to judge up front, and temporary contractors with production access need careful offboarding.

When to hire a DevOps engineer or team

There are clear situations when investing in a dedicated in-house team is the right move:

Infrastructure is your product. If you’re building a cloud platform, developer tooling or a SaaS product whose deployment model is itself a differentiator, DevOps is core to what you sell.
You operate at large scale. Organizations with many accounts, regions and services, and strict compliance requirements, often benefit from a team that lives inside the details every day.
You have highly specialized requirements. Unusual stacks, custom hardware or industry-specific frameworks that need deep, constant attention.
You can hire two or more and keep them busy. If the work fills two or three senior engineers year round and you can recruit and retain them, in-house gives you the deepest context.

If you recognize your organization here, building an in-house team likely provides the best long-term value. Even then, outside help during peaks, or for 24/7 coverage while the team grows, can be smart.

When a DevOps subscription is the better fit

For many growing companies, a subscription is more efficient, particularly when:

You’re protecting runway. You need senior DevOps expertise, but two fully loaded salaries would strain the budget.
Your needs fluctuate. Some months involve major infrastructure changes, others are quiet. A subscription absorbs both without hiring or layoffs.
You need breadth. DevOps covers cloud architecture, security, CI/CD, monitoring, databases, networking and cost control. A team gives you access to all of these rather than the skill set of one or two people.
You need help now. A subscription can start working on your infrastructure long before a hiring process would finish.
Nobody owns the pager. If your CTO or most senior developer is the de facto on-call engineer, that is the most expensive on-call rotation in the company.

How a DevOps subscription works at Webera

Webera is a DevOps subscription for SaaS teams on AWS. Senior engineers work alongside nine AI agents, each with one job, covering observability, security, CI/CD, incidents, FinOps, networking, databases, application readiness and standards. The agents do the watching, routing and first analysis around the clock; the engineers make the calls and ship the fixes.

Requests through the tools you already use. Send work through GitHub issues (preferred), Slack or email, from “fix our database performance” to “set up a complete CI/CD pipeline.” Each request gets complexity points so you know what to expect.
Three plans, priced by the month.
- Pro, $4,999 a month: unlimited requests with two active at a time, 24/7 monitoring and incident response, and an average 36-hour turnaround.
- Elite, $9,999 a month: three active requests, a named engineer and a customer success manager, a compliance concierge for SOC 2, HIPAA and PCI, and an average 24-hour turnaround.
- Platform, $14,999 a month: a team working inside your sprints, multi-account and Kubernetes operations, and knowledge transfer to your engineers.
Simple terms. Every plan has a three-month minimum, billed monthly, then continues month to month.
You own everything. All code and configuration live in your repositories, and everything is documented so it can be handed to an in-house team later. Many companies use a subscription as the bridge until they are ready to hire.

Making the right decision for your organization

When evaluating your DevOps strategy, work through these questions:

Utilization. Can you keep a full-time DevOps engineer, or two, fully busy, or would they have significant idle time?
Timeline. Can your infrastructure needs wait for a recruitment process, or do you need help now?
Breadth. Do you need a broad range of DevOps specializations, or deep expertise in one area?
Coverage. Who responds when production breaks at 3am, today?
Full cost. Have you compared the fully loaded cost of hiring (salary, benefits, recruiting, a second hire for on-call) with a subscription?

For a side-by-side look at the other options, see our posts on DevOps consulting versus a DevOps subscription and AWS managed services versus managed DevOps.

Frequently asked questions

Are DevOps engineers highly paid?

Generally, yes. The BLS has no separate DevOps category, but the two closest occupations had median annual wages of $135,980 (software developers) and $99,130 (network and computer systems administrators) in May 2025, and the top 10 percent of software developers earned more than $214,670. Senior engineers who can own AWS, Kubernetes, security and incident response alone usually command more than the median.

What do DevOps engineers do?

DevOps engineers build and run the path from code to production. That includes CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, cloud architecture, monitoring and alerting, security hygiene, cost control and, often, being on call when production breaks. The role combines software engineering with systems operations.

Is DevOps engineer a stressful job?

It can be, mostly because of on-call. When a single engineer is the only person who can fix production, they carry the pager every night of the year, which is the situation this post warns against. Sharing the rotation between at least two people, with runbooks and alerts tied to real user impact, makes the job far more sustainable.

Take the next step

If you’re working through infrastructure challenges and unsure about the best path forward:

Compare the plans. See what each plan includes on our pricing page.
Score your team. Our maturity assessment takes about eight minutes and shows where your gaps are.
Talk to us. Book a meeting or email hello@webera.com with questions about whether a subscription fits your organization.

In the meantime, add up the hours your development team loses to DevOps tasks each month. That number often makes the path forward clear.

When to Hire a DevOps Team: What a DevOps Engineer Salary Really Costs