What does a DevOps / Cloud Engineer actually do?

The short version

DevOps and cloud engineers build and run the infrastructure everything else depends on — deployment pipelines, cloud platforms, monitoring, and the on-call rota for when it breaks.

The pitch: consistently one of the best-paid engineering tracks in the UK, and the most AI-resilient — AI writes the boilerplate, humans still own the 3am incident. The catch: it's rarely a first job — almost everyone arrives via IT support, sysadmin or software engineering — and when you do it well, nothing visibly happens.

Entry routes that actually work

• IT support / sysadmin → cloud — the most common route; learn Linux, networking, one cloud provider.
• Software engineer pivot — drift from writing features to running the platform.
• Cloud certs + home lab — works with real projects behind it; weak as certificates alone.