When recruiting a DevOps engineer, experience in automating development processes and implementing continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) is key. The candidate should be able to demonstrate the ability to work with tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, and CircleCI to quickly and efficiently deliver code to production.

Familiarity with containerisation technologies, such as Docker, and orchestration tools, such as Kubernetes, is essential. The candidate should have experience in building, configuring and managing containers and clusters, which is key to ensuring application scalability and reliability.

Experience working with infrastructure-as-code tools, such as Terraform or Ansible, enables the DevOps engineer to effectively manage and automate the configuration of large-scale environments. The candidate should demonstrate the ability to use these tools to ensure infrastructure consistency and security.

The ability to configure monitoring and log management systems such as Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) is important to ensure high application availability and performance, and to quickly diagnose and resolve issues.

Knowledge of DevSecOps practices, including security test automation, access management and securing CI/CD pipelines, is essential. The candidate should demonstrate experience in integrating security across the application lifecycle, from development to testing to production.

A DevOps engineer often acts as a mediator between development and operations teams, so strong communication skills and the ability to work as part of a team are key. The candidate should be able to collaborate effectively, share knowledge and support teams to optimise DevOps processes and culture.