Who Needs Release and DevOps Engineers, and Why?

The recent surge in interest in continuous delivery has opened up the job market for release and DevOps engineers. However, despite an increasing number of conferences and publications on continuous delivery, smaller companies and start-ups still have a hard time determining the core tasks their future release and DevOps engineers should be responsible for (and what the differences between those two roles are), while universities are not sure what essential techniques and skills they should teach to their students. This paper performs an empirical analysis of online job postings to determine and compare the main tasks of release and DevOps engineers, globally and across countries. Our qualitative analysis shows that automation is the most important activity across the three roles, as articulated in job posting description data, and that the release engineer role combines the top activities of the DevOps and more traditional build engineer roles. Finally, different countries have a moderate degree of similarity between their ads, although each country has its specific focus.