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Germany is home to Europe’s third and fourth largest tech hubs, Berlin and Munich. This makes it one of the best countries for software developers. Here, we’ll take a look at average salaries for DevOps engineers at each stage of their careers and how they compare to front-end and full-stackdeveloper salaries.
Average entry-level and junior DevOps engineer salary
The average entry-level DevOps engineer salary starts at €35 816 for engineers with fewer than two years of experience. At this stage of their careers, they earn 2.1% less than their frontend counterparts and 2.5% more than the average entry-level full stack developer in Germany.
Once they’ve been in the profession for at least two years, DevOps engineers can expect a 22.3% pay increase. This puts the average junior DevOps engineer salary at €43 788 per year. Despite the significant increase, they still trail front end developers with comparable experience by 3.7% and full stack developers now earn 13.4% more.
Mid-level DevOps engineers can expect an additional 19.8% increase after they pass the four-year mark. This gives them an average annual salary of €52 467, 5.9% more than the average frontend developer. They’ve also reduced the gap between themselves and their full stack counterparts to 9.5%.
Average DevOps Engineer Salaries by Experience
Average Salary by Years Experience, showing 25th and 75th percentiles
| Years of Experience | 25th Percentile | Average | 75th Percentile |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0-2 | €27,900 | €35,816 | €48,350 |
| 2-4 | €29,700 | €43,788 | €58,013 |
| 4-6 | €40,980 | €52,467 | €63,250 |
| 6-10 | €46,175 | €59,937 | €71,250 |
| 10-15 | €50,700 | €68,526 | €82,750 |
Average senior DevOps engineer salary
Salary growth for DevOps engineers slows slightly once they reach higher levels of seniority. Why? One reason is due to senior developers generally changing jobs less often than juniors. Companies also have to start thinking about salary increases as a developer’s salary level becomes “more expensive”.
However, they can still look forward to a 14.2% pay rise after they’ve gained at least six years of experience. At this stage of their careers, they can expect an average salary of €59 937, 2.8% more than those working on the frontend and 1.7% more than the average full stack developer.
The average senior DevOps engineer's salary increases by an additional 14.3% once they pass the ten-year mark, giving them an average salary of €68 526.
Keep in mind
The data in this article is taken from StackOverflow’s 2022 Developer Survey’s open data. In this article, ‘salary’ refers to the gross annual salary (before tax) provided by 420 survey respondents from Germany who identified as DevOps engineers.
We only included salary insights for experience levels with enough data points to ensure that the amounts represent DevOps engineers in the country. That’s why we’ve omitted developers with more than fifteen years of experience from the article.
We also ran an outlier analysis to identify data points skewing the distribution of salaries. These points were removed from the final dataset to ensure that the amounts are representative of DevOps engineers in Germany. We’ve also included the 25th and 75th percentiles to give you further information about the distribution of salary data.
Average salaries are single data points and only one part of a bigger story. Many respondents may earn significantly more or significantly less than these averages. However, we hope to show underlying trends by mapping the average salaries for different experience levels.
These averages should not be used to estimate what your actual salary will or should be. Salaries depend on the company size, industry, individual, perks and nature of the work. These factors all influence the salary a company will offer to a prospective hire. In addition, most developers are “fluent” in several languages and work across multiple roles, which will also affect the final figures.
It’s also important to remember that every individual’s context is different. Salary is a personal conversation that should take place between employee and employer.
On OfferZen you can hire DevOps engineers and find DevOps engineer jobs.
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