Services
DevOps and platform engineering
Pipelines, clusters, infrastructure as code and the telemetry that turns an outage into a five-minute diagnosis.
- Indicative rate
- $20–52 / hour
- Shortlist
- 3 CVs in 48 hours
- Overlap
- 4–8 hours daily, contracted
- We accept
- 1 engineer in 12
How it works
This is the group's home discipline rather than a line we added to look complete. Our sister company is an AWS Advanced Partner and has run this work for its own clients since before Skydream took it offshore, which means the people we place here are judged against production we are already accountable for.
The brief we decline is 'make us cloud-native'. The briefs we take are specific and measurable: this deploy takes forty minutes and fails one time in five, this bill doubled while traffic did not, this cluster upgrade has been deferred twice, this service pages someone at 3am and nobody can tell why. Each of those has a before and an after you can put a number against.
Most of this work is better bought as an engineer inside your team than as a consulting engagement, because the hard part is not the first fix — it is the second and third, once the engineer knows your estate. Where the work genuinely has an end date, such as a migration or a Terraform rewrite, we scope it fixed-price and say so.
Choosing the right model
When another model fits better
Do not buy this if what you actually need is someone to keep existing servers patched, backed up and monitored — that is system administration and it costs less. And if you have no deployable application yet, DevOps work is premature; the pipeline can wait until there is something to ship through it.
Every engagement model here is priced on the rates page, so you can compare the options rather than take our word for which one fits.
Rates
Rate bands by experience and market
| Experience | United States | United Kingdom | Australia | United Arab Emirates | Canada |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| build2–4 years | $20–28/hour$3,200–4,480/month | £150–210/day£3,000–4,200/month | A$28–38/hourA$4,480–6,080/month | AED 95–135/hourAED 15,200–21,600/month | C$30–40/hourC$4,800–6,400/month |
| senior5–8 years | $28–38/hour$4,480–6,080/month | £210–300/day£4,200–6,000/month | A$38–52/hourA$6,080–8,320/month | AED 135–185/hourAED 21,600–29,600/month | C$40–54/hourC$6,400–8,640/month |
| lead9+ years, or tech lead | $38–52/hour$6,080–8,320/month | £300–450/day£6,000–9,000/month | A$52–70/hourA$8,320–11,200/month | AED 185–250/hourAED 29,600–40,000/month | C$54–72/hourC$8,640–11,520/month |
All-inclusive and indicative, shown so you can compare us against a local hire. Monthly figures assume 160 hours a month and the same for the day-rate markets, so the two always reconcile. Engagements are contracted as a monthly capacity fee or a fixed-scope deliverable, with our own delivery lead accountable for the outcome — see engagement models. There is no setup fee, no recruitment fee and no management surcharge.
Questions
DevOps and platform engineering
- Will you have production access?
- Only what the work requires, under your IAM, with named identities, MFA and an audit trail. In most engagements that means read-only plus a change pipeline rather than direct write access to production.
- Can you work alongside our existing platform team?
- Yes, and that is the common case. The engineer takes a workstream — pipelines, cost, observability — rather than a mandate, and reports into your lead like anyone else on the team.
- Do you do one-off audits?
- We do, as a fixed-scope piece: a written report on the estate, the risks and the costed remediation. It is useful when you need a second opinion. It is poor value if you already know what is wrong and need the hands to fix it.
- What does a DevOps engineer cost?
- $28–52 an hour depending on seniority, which is the lead band on our published rates — DevOps sits at the top of the range because the scarcity is real.
Other ways to work with us
System administration and server management
Someone whose job is that the servers are patched, backed up, monitored and boring.
Named engineers inside your team, reporting to your leads, working your hours.
Hand over a function — maintenance, QA, cloud operations, support — with the service level written down.
Send us one role brief
One page is enough: the stack, the seniority, the first month of work and the hours you need covered. Three shortlisted CVs come back within 48 hours, with the rate band and notice period attached.