by Rosalie Chan —thisisinsider.com — – Turns out the hottest job of 2018 could be that of a DevOps engineer. LinkedIn just released its report on the most-recruited jobs of 2018, showing that DevOps engineer was the most recruited job, followed by enterprise account executives and frontend engineers, in second and third place, respectively. This job is in high demand, and the money shows it. According to Indeed, job postings for DevOps engineers shot up 91 percent between 2014 and 2017. And the average base salary cashes in at $125,714, per the same data. According to the LinkedIn report, DevOps engineers are also the most recruited jobs specific to the engineering field, followed by frontend engineers and cloud architects.

So what does a DevOps engineer do, anyway? The term “DevOps” is a portmanteau of “Development” and “Operations,” two roles that are vital to the field of software engineering. In short, the term refers to tools and practices that help engineers deliver and fix code on a more regular and faster basis, often multiple times a day — a practice pioneered by Facebook and its cohort. Before, developer teams would build and test the code, while operations teams would deploy and monitor the code. A DevOps engineer does both, and generally carries the end-to-end responsibility of developing, testing, deploying, monitoring and improving the code. That said, the relatively flashy new job title can be somewhat vague, and the responsibilities of the role can differ across companies.

Indeed, Engineers argue that “DevOps” is more of a culture and mindset, rather than a single job. A DevOps engineer’s responsibilities can overlap with other types of engineers, such as site reliability engineers. And like other software engineers, DevOps engineers have to collaborate with their team to write and restructure code. At the same time, these engineers have to have the right skills to back up this mindset. DevOps engineers have to ensure that the software will work across different platforms, as well as frequently test and deploy their code. To become a DevOps engineer, one should be able to use open source technologies and automation tools, as well as have strong skills in testing, coding and scripting. People skills are also crucial, as the DevOps philosophy requires more collaboration among, well, developers and operations. Still, the very concept of DevOps has become a hot commodity in Silicon Valley: Investors are putting massive amounts of cash into DevOps startups that help their teams take advantage of this mindset. In that light, it’s not surprising that companies are hiring for DevOps talent, too. As for the rest of the top three: Frontend engineers build the user interface of websites and apps, which is a crucial part of any software team. Enterprise account executives manage business relationships with a company’s large customers, which speaks to the importance of the sales function.