How Much DevOps Knowledge Is Actually Required for an SDE?

The Question Every Developer Eventually Asks ## The Old Model vs. Today’s Reality ## The Old World (Mostly Gone) ## The World We Actually Work In ## What DevOps Knowledge Is Not Required ## The Minimum DevOps Knowledge Every SDE Should Have ✅ ## 1. Deployment Awareness ## 2. Logging & Monitoring ## 3. Basic Cloud & Container Concepts ## 4. CI/CD Basics ## Kubernetes: How Deep Should You Go? ## A Real Mistake I Made Early On ## How DevOps Expectations Scale With Seniority ## Junior SDE ## Mid-Level SDE ## Senior SDE ## Final Verdict At some point in your career, it happens. Your code works locally. Tests pass. The PR gets approved. “It broke in production.” Suddenly you’re staring at logs, pipelines, dashboards, YAML files, and thinking: “Wait… how much DevOps am I actually expected to know as an SDE?” This question comes up constantly. As teams move faster and ownership shifts left, the line between dev and ops keeps getting blurrier. The short answer: more than before, less than a DevOps engineer. The long answer is where real-world experience matters. Earlier, responsibilities were clear: That worked when releases were slow and systems were simpler. Even if your title says Software Development Engineer, production doesn’t care. Let’s clear some confusion. As an SDE, you are not expected to: This is the baseline I’ve seen across healthy engineering teams. You don’t need to build pipelines — but you must understand them. If your code runs in production, you should know: If you can’t debug your own service, someone else will — and they won’t be happy about it. You don’t need deep expertise, but you should understand: This is table-stakes knowledge now. You should be comfortable: Pipelines are part of the codebase. Ignoring them isn’t an option. You don’t need to become a Kubernetes expert overnight. But as an SDE, it helps to understand: If you want a structured, developer-friendly way to learn this, I’ve documented my own journey here: 👉 30 Days of Kubernetes for Backend Developers https://nileshblog.tech/category/backend-dev/kubernetes/30-days-kubernetes/ It’s written from a developer’s perspective — not an infra-first one — and focuses on just enough Kubernetes to be effective. Early in my career, I treated deployments as “not my responsibility.” My service deployed automatically, so I never checked the pipeline. One day, a config change caused the app to crash-loop in production. The logs clearly explained the issue. I just didn’t know where to find them. That mistake permanently changed how I approach production. Depth increases — scope doesn’t. You don’t become a DevOps engineer. You become a more production-aware engineer. So how much DevOps knowledge is required for an SDE? DevOps knowledge isn’t about role overlap — it’s about shared responsibility. If you can ship code and understand what happens after shipping, you’re exactly where you should be. How much DevOps knowledge is expected in your current role? And where do you think the line should be? Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. Are you sure you want to hide this comment? It will become hidden in your post, but will still be visible via the comment's permalink. Hide child comments as well For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse - Developers wrote code - Ops deployed and ran it - Production issues were “someone else’s problem” - CI/CD is automatic - Systems are distributed - Failures are expected - Teams own services end to end - Design Kubernetes clusters from scratch - Be an expert in Terraform modules - Tune networking or kernel internals - Fully replace a DevOps/SRE team - How your service gets deployed - What happens after you merge to main - Where to look when deployments fail - Where logs are stored - How to search and filter them - What “normal” vs “broken” looks like - What containers are - Why environment variables matter - What scaling actually means - Why stateless services are preferred - Reading pipeline configs - Understanding failed builds - Knowing when a rollback is required - What Pods, Services, and Deployments are - How your app is exposed - How config and secrets are injected - How crashes and restarts work - If you write the code, you own how it behaves - DevOps knowledge isn’t about control — it’s about responsibility - Learning the basics is cheaper than debugging blindly - Understand deployments conceptually - Read logs and metrics - Fix CI-related failures - Debug production issues independently - Understand scaling and configuration - Make small infra or pipeline changes - Design services with operability in mind - Review infra changes safely - Mentor others on production readiness - Own your code in production - Debug issues confidently - Collaborate effectively with DevOps/SRE teams - Replace DevOps engineers - Run infrastructure alone - Burn out doing two jobs