Hire Senior DevOps Engineers

A full-time senior DevOps engineer in the US costs roughly $180,000 to $250,000 a year once you include salary, payroll taxes, benefits, equipment and recruiter fees. Our retainer is $2,999/month on the Startup plan (one request at a time) and $4,999/month on Business (two concurrent requests), with Enterprise priced to scope. Billing is monthly, you can pause or cancel at any time, and unused days carry over rather than expiring. The real comparison is not senior versus junior, it is a fixed annual salary versus a cost you can switch off when the work stops.

Usually within a few days of the intro call. There is no job posting, no notice period and no onboarding budget to approve. We start with a short review of your current setup, agree on the first two or three priorities, and begin from there. Most individual requests are completed in about 48 hours on average, with larger pieces either taking longer or being split into several requests. Compare that with hiring, where three to six months from job posting to productive output is normal, and the gap is the point.

Senior engineers, with no junior tier and no handoff to someone less experienced once you have signed. The focus is AWS, and the work covers Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, CI/CD (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins), monitoring (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana) and security hardening. The reason the economics work is that seniority is shared across clients instead of sitting idle. You pay for the hours where senior judgment changes the outcome rather than funding a full-time salary to keep that judgment on standby.

No. Rebuilding is expensive and rarely necessary. We start by reading what you already have, in Terraform, in the console and in your pipelines, and documenting what is actually running. From there we agree what to fix first, usually the things creating risk or cost: unmanaged resources, missing backups, deploy steps only one person understands. Changes are incremental and go through your normal review process. If we do recommend replacing something, you get the reasoning and the migration path before any work starts, not after.

No minimum term and no annual commitment. Billing is monthly and you can pause or cancel at any point before your next renewal. If you pause partway through a month, the unused days are held and applied when you come back, so a quiet month is not wasted spend. Enterprise engagements can sit on a formal contract if your procurement process needs one. The standard plans deliberately avoid lock-in: the intent is that you keep paying because the work is worth it, not because leaving is awkward.

An NDA is available on every plan and is standard on Enterprise. Most of the security question is about access rather than paperwork. We work with the least access that gets the job done: scoped IAM roles rather than root, your identity provider where you have one, and credentials you issue and can revoke without asking us. Work is coordinated on a private board visible only to your team and ours. If you have a vendor security questionnaire, send it before you sign rather than after, and we will work through it.

We work European hours as standard and hold availability into the US afternoon, so teams on both sides of the Atlantic have a same-day path to a senior engineer. A request raised by a US West Coast team in their morning is normally picked up the same working day, and European teams get answers inside business hours. Intro calls can be booked from roughly 2:00am to 2:00pm Pacific. Day-to-day work runs asynchronously through your private board, so progress does not depend on both teams being online at the same moment.

One clearly scoped piece of work with a definable finish: set up a CI/CD pipeline for a service, harden an AWS account, add Prometheus and Grafana monitoring to a cluster, write Terraform for a new environment. On the Startup plan, one request at a time means one is actively being worked on, not one per month. Requests are unlimited, so as soon as one is delivered the next starts. If a submission is really several projects bundled together, we will say so and split it into a queue you can reorder at any time.

A freelancer is often cheaper per hour and fine for a single well-defined task, but you carry the cost of finding one, vetting them, and losing all context when they move on. An agency typically sells fixed-scope projects with a statement of work, a sales cycle, and change requests every time the scope shifts. A retainer sits between the two: a consistent senior team that keeps context on your infrastructure month to month, with no scoping negotiation for each new piece of work and no notice period on either side.

Move to the Business plan at $4,999/month for two concurrent requests. That is the usual fix when the single queue becomes the bottleneck rather than the work itself. Plan changes apply from your next billing cycle and can be reversed just as easily once the surge passes. If you need more than two parallel workstreams, or engineers working directly inside your own Slack or Teams, that is what the Enterprise plan covers and it is priced to the scope. Scaling down is handled exactly the same way as scaling up.

You cancel, and nothing is held back. Everything we build lives in your accounts and your repositories from the first day: Terraform in your version control, pipelines in your CI, credentials you own. There is no proprietary layer that stops working when billing stops. Before the final month ends we hand over documentation for what we built or changed, and we will walk through it with whoever is picking it up. If you are cancelling because you have hired someone in-house, that handover is part of the deal.