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Salary snapshot: What is a lead DevOps engineer paid today?

Our monthly salary snapshot looks at lead DevOps engineer salaries, which are high and getting higher due to the worsening developer shortage. Here's how the paychecks stack up.

Looking for work as a lead DevOps engineer? There's good news. While there's opportunity around the country for both lead DevOps engineer and lead software roles, salaries for DevOps are still running away with a substantial premium.

New York is a great example. A lead DevOps engineer can make between $137,000 and $180,000, according to April 2018 job data from Glassdoor. The average salary of a lead DevOps engineer based in the Big Apple is $141,452. A lead software developer, on the other hand, would be looking at salaries ranging from $93,000 to $167,000, with an average base pay of $114,646.

Jobs in Denver offer another contrast. A lead DevOps engineer could expect salary to range from $124,000 to $163,000. The average base DevOps pay in Denver is $128,137. For a lead software developer, that paycheck, while still healthy, suffers in comparison. A lead dev position has a salary range of $79,000 to $145,000, with an average compensation packet of $98,963.

To focus on the good news, though, DevOps or not, demand for developer jobs is in no danger of disappearing. If anything, the developer shortage has become even more severe.

lead DevOps
Developer demand still outpaces supply.

Tierney Cyren, a developer advocate at NodeSource, travels the country talking to software engineers in all kinds of companies. The difficulties in finding and hiring developers are a regular topic of conversation. His takeaway: It will be years before the gap between demand and supply closes.

So whether it's a lead DevOps engineer or an entry-level development position, the future looks bright and very stable for developers today.

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