|
> In 2017, there's literally _no_ difference between the outcomes expected from a "Systems Engineer" and a "DevOps Engineer" I don't find the title 'Systems Engineer' to be in widespread usage at tech startups in SV, so I'm not sure what to expect from one. To be honest, I would expect Systems Engineers to be working on hardware. The infrastructure automation work done at modern tech startups is best described by the title 'DevOps Engineering'. If you're posting a job where the requirements include using automation code to set up and configure CI/CD, monitoring, alerting, Databases, Analytics, AWS, GCE, Heroku or other 3rd-party SAAS tools, the job title in widespread usage that encompasses that is DevOps. The Webmaster, Ops, DBA, SRE, IT, Systems Engineer, and SysAdmin titles describe different skillsets and are therefore less useful for describing a role with these kinds of requirements. Here's an AWS-specific, but otherwise useful reference of a modern 'DevOps' skillset: https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-devops-engine... |
Some science background (whichever science is relevant to the project) but mostly a lot of experience in general engineering practices (what generally works, how things break, what is sufficient to test to feel good that a unit will still work when moved from point A to point B, etc.). Many have software skills, but some do not. It is generally a high level role so not all projects have one even part time, but those that do tend to have it scoped roughly the same.
Projects that deal with field work / tests, especially bringing stuff to faraway / hard to get to places tend to value systems engineers (defined as above) highly and almost always have one at least part time. Just my experience.