Keep the software running and the releases flowing. Job Bank's median is about $117,000 a year, and the work is rarely seen.
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The median pay is about $117,000 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $73,000 at the lower end to about $190,000 at the upper end. The source is listed under Sources at the end of this page.
3 to 6 years after high school, on the usual route.
$800 to $62,000 all in for tuition, fees, exams and kit. Living costs are not counted.
No. There is no licence to hold, though many employers still ask for training or a certificate.
Moderate demand nationally, from government outlook data. Demand varies by region, so check your area.
Or read the whole thing here
What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Median
$117,000
Lower end
$73,000
Upper end
$190,000
Job Bank's national median is $56.49 an hour, about $117,000 a year at 40 hours a week. The lower and upper ends are Job Bank's low and high wages for everyone in the group, $35 and $91.35 an hour. The page sits under the broader software engineers group (NOC, the National Occupational Classification, code 21231). DevOps is rarely a first job.
$62.50 an hour
The median in British Columbia, the highest of any province
Ontario follows at $56.73 and Quebec at $53.60. Prince Edward Island's median is the lowest, at $41.69. Senior DevOps engineers, SREs (site reliability engineers) and platform leads are the ones near the top. Big tech companies add stock on top. On-call pay and overtime for outages can add more at some employers.
Roughly, all in
$800 to $62,000
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is somebody who learned on no-cost cloud provider tiers at home and paid only for a couple of certification exams, which is a normal route into this work. The high end is a four year computer science degree at the expensive end of Canadian tuition plus a few certifications bought out of pocket. A two or three year college diploma sits in the middle at roughly $17,000 in total. Most employers pay for certifications once you are hired, so the exam fees are often a one time cost you carry only until the first job.
Employers often pay for certifications once you are hired. Many DevOps engineers built their skills at home on no-cost cloud tiers.
Remote work
Servers are in the cloud, so you can be anywhere.
On-call pay
Many employers pay extra for carrying the pager, and more if you get woken up.
Stock options or RSUs (restricted stock units, company shares you receive over time)
Standard at tech companies.
Paid certifications and conferences
Cloud vendors run big events and employers send DevOps staff.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Usually a second job, not a first one. You earn it by knowing both code and servers.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Math and computer science. Install Linux on an old laptop and learn the command line. That one habit is the start of this career.
Computer science degree or college diploma
2 to 5 years
A 4-year degree or a 2 to 3 year diploma. BCIT (British Columbia Institute of Technology) offers a Cloud Computing option in its diploma. Pick co-op.
First tech job
1 to 3 years
Developer, systems administrator or IT (information technology) support. You learn how software actually breaks.
Learn the DevOps toolset
Alongside work
A cloud platform (AWS, Amazon Web Services, or Azure), containers (Docker, Kubernetes), continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, infrastructure as code (Terraform). Get one or two certificates.
Move into DevOps
3 to 6 years after high school
Often inside the same company, by being the developer who fixes the deploy pipeline.
Computer science
Scripting is most of the job.
Math
Required for computer science degrees. Capacity planning is arithmetic at scale.
Networking or IT (information technology) courses
If your school has them. Networks are half of what breaks.
English
Writing clear incident reports and runbooks is a real skill.
No licence and no professional body. The word engineer in the title is a sore point: it is legally protected in most provinces, so some companies use titles like DevOps specialist or platform developer instead. Alberta changed its law in 2023 to allow software engineer titles without a licence. Either way, nobody checks a licence to hire you.
The CEGEP (public college) years sit between high school and work or university, and in Quebec the title DevOps engineer is reserved for licensed engineers.
Finish Secondary V
Age 16 or 17
Take Secondary IV math in the Technical and Scientific or the Science sequence. It meets the math requirement for the computer science DEC (Diploma of College Studies) and keeps university science programs open.
Computer Science Technology DEC (420.B0)
3 years
3 years at a CEGEP (public college), with no tuition for full-time Quebec residents. It covers programming and networks, and colleges can add web apps and network automation. In English at Dawson, Vanier, John Abbott, Champlain and Heritage.
First job as a developer or administrator
2 to 4 years
DevOps work is rarely a first job. People get there from software development or system administration. The DEC (Diploma of College Studies) ends with an internship.
Bachelor's, if you want one
3 to 4 years
A Quebec bachelor's after CEGEP is shorter. Concordia's Bachelor of Computer Science takes 3 to 4 years and accepts the computer science DEC without the usual science math courses.
Adult shortcut: an AEC (Attestation of College Studies)
About 1 year
Dawson's Network Administration and Support AEC (ELJ.3B) is 1,260 hours, full time in the afternoons and evenings, and prepares you for Microsoft, Linux and Cisco certifications.
In Quebec the title engineer is reserved by law for members of the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec (the Quebec order of engineers, OIQ). The Engineers Act covers the title alone or qualified, so DevOps engineer counts, and the order takes reports of people using engineer in a job title or on social media. Fines start at $2,500 for a person. To earn the title you need an accredited engineering bachelor's, such as Concordia's 4 to 5 year Software Engineering degree, then the order's admission program: a 3 hour exam, supervised work and proof of French.
Things you don't need, but that help.
AWS (Amazon Web Services) Solutions Architect or DevOps Engineer
Asked for in many cloud job ads.
CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator)
A 2-hour hands-on exam at a command line. Well respected because you cannot fake it.
Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud certificates
Banks and government lean Azure. Startups lean AWS and Google.
Security
DevSecOps roles, where you build security into the pipeline.
A home lab
A few cheap machines or no-cost cloud credits where you break things on purpose.
Open source contributions
Most DevOps tools are open source and their communities are welcoming.
A programming language beyond scripts
Go and Python are the languages of the tooling.
SRE (site reliability engineer) is the version of this job invented at Google. Same tools, but the focus is on keeping a big service online, measuring reliability with numbers and deciding how much risk to take on each release.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Check the dashboards and overnight alerts. Stand-up with the developers. Then project work: writing the code that builds servers automatically, speeding up a slow deploy pipeline, cutting the cloud bill, setting up monitoring for a new service. If you are on call, an outage can interrupt anything, including dinner. When things go wrong you lead the fix and write up what happened so it does not happen again.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
DevOps is short for development and operations. Twenty years ago, developers wrote code and a separate operations team ran the servers, and the two groups blamed each other when things broke. DevOps is the idea that one team should do both.
Kubernetes, the tool most DevOps engineers spend their days with, is the Greek word for helmsman, the person who steers a ship. That is why its logo is a ship's wheel.
Shopify processes billions of dollars of orders in a single weekend every November. Keeping that online is the work of platform and reliability engineers.
Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.
Software first, then the rest of the field. See every career in tech.
Last checked October 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in Canadian dollars, based on Government of Canada Job Bank wage data and published salary grids. They vary by province, employer and experience. Tuition is for domestic students. How every figure on this site is sourced and checked.
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