Database Administrator vs DevOps Engineer

On pay, devops engineers come out ahead by about $8k a year at the midpoint of posted bands: $70k–$141k against $75k–$120k for database administrators. These are advertised figures from postings that state a salary, not estimates. By seniority and country: database administrator salary and devops engineer salary.

On skills, they are mostly different jobs that happen to share a name or a hallway. The overlap is thin, which is often exactly why people search this pair. The skills both sets of postings want most are Terraform, AWS, Azure, Linux, Python.

Yes, and the numbers say how far along you already are: a typical database administrator profile covers 15% of what devops engineer postings ask for. Our estimate for the move is 12–24 mo. The instrument lists the exact skills that make up the rest.

Going the other way, a typical devops engineer profile covers 38% of what database administrator postings ask for. The two directions are not symmetric: devops engineer to database administrator is the easier move, 38% against 15%.

Right now our board has 71 database administrator openings and 600 devops engineer openings, each linking to the original posting. The board refreshes every night, so the counts move with the market. Hiring the most database administrators at the moment: ServiceNow (3), Das Team Ag (3), Coopers Group AG (3). For devops engineers: BoschGroup (10), myitjob GmbH (8), Bright Vision Technologies (8).