The modern DevOps hiring model is broken. Turnover is high, ramp-up time is measured in months, and the cost of vacancies can exceed six figures. Organizations face chronic operational gaps, mounting technical debt, and inflated budgets. Although teams have outsized demand to hire new engineers, the demand for qualified DevOps engineers far outstrips the number of qualified candidates. Forge enables DevOps teams to do more, and our embedded pods help take ownership of your infrastructure needs.

Over the past few years, DevOps salaries have climbed steadily because demand continues to far outstrip supply. Advertised DevOps engineer salaries rose by 12% between 2020 and 2023. Despite growing salaries, open positions continue to remain stubbornly unfilled. In early 2025, there were over 257,025 active DevOps engineer job openings in the U.S. alone. Only 11,029 positions were filled, suggesting that for each filled role, there remain 20–25 job openings on the market. 

Job postings for DevOps roles have grown approximately 20% year over year since 2020, further highlighting the surging demand and talent shortage. Indeed, this gap means that organizations engage in bidding wars for top talent while still being unable to fully staff teams. 

This combination of high demand and understaffed teams leads to high attrition among engineers; 40% of DevOps engineers churn within the first two years, in part due to understaffed teams that lead to high stress, 24/7 on-call rotations, and burnout from juggling infrastructure, security, and automation tasks. 

These vacancies create large vacancy costs and replacement costs that materialize in the form of lost productivity and critical responsibilities like infrastructure automation, monitoring, and security compliance remaining unaddressed, creating technical debt and operational risk that lead to tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue and downtime.

It’s clear that DevOps hiring is broken. Companies must rethink DevOps as a capability rather than a single headcount. The goal shifts from filling open slots to ensuring consistent, automated, and scalable DevOps practices. Organizations should adopt platform-centric, AI-augmented solutions that embed best practices, policy enforcement, and observability throughout the software delivery lifecycle. Such an approach decouples business outcomes from individual hires and mitigates risk from turnover and scarce human expertise, allowing teams to be fully operational and equipped to do their best work.

Forge is the AI-powered DevOps platform that augments existing teams, reduces reliance on large headcounts, and embeds institutional knowledge in code. Forge empowers smaller teams to build and operate enterprise-grade infrastructure reliably and securely—without the endless recruitment treadmill. Rather than hiring a large team of in-house DevOps engineers, companies can leverage Forge to automate and scale critical practices.

Rather than looking for experienced DevOps engineers that fail to materialize, an organization can contract an experienced pod of 2-3 senior DevOps engineers who are equipped with Forge to provide full-service DevOps services. Within three months, we transform from ad-hoc scripts and manual processes to fully automated, policy-driven deployments across development, staging, and production, which reduces overall workload and allows lean teams to ship fast. 

If you’re interested, book a demo today. Mention this blogpost and we can do the first month free.