Hi KodeKloud Community,
I’m looking for some practical career guidance from experienced DevOps engineers and mentors here.
My current situation,
Role: DevOps Engineer
Experience: 1.3 years Flutter Developer + 1.4 years DevOps Engg = 2.7 years
Current salary: ₹18,000/month (take-home)
Company: Small product/startup environment
What I’m doing at work:
Implementing end-to-end DevOps for multiple products.
i am the only devops engineer in my office
AWS infrastructure provisioning (Terraform)
Configuration management (Ansible)
CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions / Jenkins)
Docker, Docker swarm, compose
Linux server management, deployments, HA setup, documentation
I’m learning a lot and getting good hands-on exposure, but:
- Salary is very low compared to market
- No certification reimbursement
- No clear growth in salary wise or compensation correction plan (but they give me the title as a sr. software engineer)
My current grinding,
- implementing & documenting the end-to-end devops for our companies new product on the line
- brushing up my previous skill Full Stack Developer Mobile + web. along with security
- Conducting free online webinar & college workshops regarding the DevOps content
- also posting contents in Linkedin, youtube, hashnode.
My confusion:
- If I stay, I continue learning deeply but remain underpaid
- If I switch, I may earn more and get certification support, but I’m unsure about the quality of work and learning
** note in my current company i doesnt plan of implementing k8s since our all products are in startup phase and the traffics are very low. so i planned on implementing the Docker swarm single node deployment. instead of k8s. and i’ll make the architecture decision also **
Questions I’d really like guidance on:
- can i stay in this company for one more year and do AWS SAA and CKA certifications on my own salary with community recognition by mentoring others and posting contents in linkedin, hashnode, and youtube. then switch after a year with higher packages
- or Else switch to other job which pays me 4-5LPA but i’ll work on a specific part not complete end-to-end, doing lot of global certifications with company certification re-imbursement policy and then from my side hustle improve my portfolio and then switch from that company to another company
I’m not looking for motivation or shortcuts — just ground-reality advice from people who’ve been through similar phases. and i am ready to put all my energy into it.
Thanks in advance for your time and guidance.