DevOps Engineer

On a devops engineer apprenticeship course, you’ll help design, build, test, implement, release and iterate products.

A DevOps engineer assists organisations in providing usable, functional software to active users, both external and internal, on a consistent and secure basis, reducing time to market, boosting value, and improving the quality of digital services.

In its most basic form, DevOps is a concept and way of working that combines two IT organisation sectors: those who develop software and maintain it in a live environment.

As a DevOps engineer, you’ll integrate both disciplines, understanding and appreciating how your code works in practice and resolving any issues that arise.

You will be responsible for all aspects of the development and operations processes, including product design, construction, testing, implementation, release, and ongoing iteration.

You’ll learn how to script and code, work with application programming interfaces, and build and design IT architecture.

What you’ll learn

On a devops engineer apprenticeship course, you’ll learn to:

• Use various methods, such as ‘show and tell’ and ‘demonstrations,’ to communicate credibly with technical and non-technical people at different levels.
• Collaborate with both internal and external partners in a variety of organisational cultures.
• Initiate and encourage information sharing and technological collaboration.
• Navigate and troubleshoot stateful distributed systems to discover and fix issues throughout the service lifecycle.
• Work in agile, multi-disciplinary delivery teams to produce flexible, collaborative, and pragmatic work.
• Assess current and potential security threats and take action based on likelihood vs impact.
• Apply a systematic approach to problem resolution, finding the root cause of issues via reasoning and hypotheses/experimentation.
• Consider automating tasks when it increases the efficiency of business processes and reduces waste, considering the effort and cost of automation.
• Take part in effective pair/mob programming.
• Write tests and follow the Test Driven Development discipline in several situations.
• Invest in continuous learning for your and others’ development, and make sure that learning activities align with changing job requirements. 
• Write your code in a general-purpose programming language.
• Identify issues and make informed decisions, log and metrics data must be interpreted in the context.
• Write code in a way that simplifies merging and allows for abstraction-based branching – i.e. feature toggling.
• Use incremental refactoring to build the architecture, which entails making small code changes that maintain behaviour.

Entry requirements

You’ll usually need:

• A-levels; a level 3 apprenticeship or other relevant qualification; relevant experience and/or an aptitude test.
• Apprentices without level 2 English and maths will need to achieve this before taking the end-point assessment.

Assessment methods

The End Point Assessment comprises two distinct assessment methods: 

•  Project and Practical Assessment
• Professional discussion 

Duration, level, subjects and potential salary upon completion

Apprenticeship standard

More information about the Level 4 DevOps Engineer Apprenticeship standard can be found here.

Apprenticeship end point assessment

For more information about the End Point Assessment Process, please read the Institute of Apprenticeships’ information page.