Hire DevOps engineers who keep the pipeline from becoming the bottleneck
Hire dedicated DevOps engineers from a staffing partner that has spent two decades shipping software where slow pipelines and brittle infrastructure showed up as developer throughput problems. We place senior CI/CD engineers, cloud platform engineers, and infrastructure automation specialists in the Philippines for SaaS, fintech, and enterprise teams. Every engineer on the bench is pre-vetted on Docker, Kubernetes, and modern cloud tooling, and ready to start in 7 days.
QA teams trusted by enterprises, scale-ups, and Fortune 500s
Previously founded VinSolutions ($150M+ exit) and Stackify
I was the DevOps engineer at two startups before I finally hired someone to do it properly
At VinSolutions and Stackify, I was the person managing deployments when there was nobody else to do it. That meant writing the build scripts, provisioning the servers, and figuring out why the release broke in staging but not locally. I got reasonably good at it. I also learned firsthand how much time it takes away from the actual engineering work the business needs, and how much technical debt accumulates when infrastructure is nobody's job in particular.
The problem most growing engineering teams have is not that they are doing DevOps wrong. It is that DevOps is nobody's full-time job. A senior developer handles the CI pipeline between features. The on-call rotation manages the cloud costs between incidents. Nobody owns the infrastructure roadmap, the security posture, or the deployment velocity as a product in its own right. That is when you start shipping slower, paying more for cloud than you should, and discovering that your most valuable engineers are spending their Fridays on infrastructure work.
Hiring a dedicated DevOps engineer fixes the root cause. You get someone who owns the pipeline end to end, keeps Kubernetes healthy, writes the Terraform modules the team actually uses, and treats deployment reliability the way a product engineer treats a feature. The Philippines has deep cloud and DevOps talent at 40-50% of the cost of a US hire, and Full Scale has been placing those engineers on US product teams for years.
If your developers are managing infrastructure, you are solving the wrong problem. A dedicated DevOps engineer from Full Scale gives you someone who owns that work full time, integrates directly with your team, and ships improvements to your developer experience the way your product engineers ship features. That is what you are paying for.
AI writes the infrastructure code, real DevOps engineers decide what to build
AI is reshaping DevOps tooling as fast as it is reshaping application development. Cursor and GitHub Copilot can scaffold a Helm chart, write a Terraform module, or generate a GitHub Actions pipeline in minutes. Every DevOps engineer we work with now uses AI tooling as part of their standard workflow.
That handles the syntax. It does not handle the strategy. The hard DevOps work — deciding what your deployment architecture should look like, which observability gaps are actually costing you money, and when to abstract versus when to simplify — still needs a senior DevOps engineer who has shipped real infrastructure at scale. That is what we hire and train for at Full Scale.
AI generates the Terraform, DevOps engineers own the architecture
AI assistants can write a Kubernetes manifest, scaffold a GitHub Actions workflow, or draft a Terraform module faster than any engineer can type one from scratch. What they cannot do is decide whether that infrastructure is secure, cost-efficient, recoverable, and appropriate for your actual load profile. The strategy work — designing the deployment topology, choosing the right observability stack, deciding when Kubernetes is overkill and when it isn't — still needs a senior DevOps engineer doing the judgment work. AI is a force multiplier on the implementation layer. Architecture is where the human still has to think.
Product Driven DevOps
Our DevOps engineers are trained on the five pillars from Matt's book: Vision, Focus, Clarity, Ownership, and Courage. The result is infrastructure engineers who push back on a Jira ticket that asks for a new environment without a clear use case, treat deployment reliability as a product feature with real SLOs, and own the developer experience the way a product engineer owns a user flow. They are not ticket-closers. They are the engineers who tell you when the real problem is architecture, not configuration.
Read Product Driven, the bookThe best DevOps hire I ever made was an engineer who told me the architecture was wrong before she set up a single pipeline. That is the difference between a configuration manager and a platform engineer.
The engineering team behind AMC Theatres
Dedicated DevOps engineers, starting at $35 an hour
That rate covers a senior DevOps engineer in the Philippines working full-time on your infrastructure, with payroll, benefits, HR, and equipment all handled by Full Scale. The same role hired locally in the US runs $130K to $190K a year for a senior DevOps engineer, and that math is what drives most of our clients to call.
- Full-time, dedicated DevOps engineer
- Pre-vetted on Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud platforms
- Works your hours, your tools, your infrastructure stack
- Payroll, HR, equipment, benefits handled by us
- US-based account manager you can escalate to
- 30-day replacement guarantee if it isn't a fit
Full Scale has made the Inc. 5000 four years in a row and is Great Place to Work certified. We have been placing engineers in the Philippines since 2018, and pricing isn't the only reason clients stay — it's just the easiest reason to call.
The reason offshore DevOps works here
You can also hire dedicated developers in the Philippines across every stack we staff — including application engineers, QA engineers, and DevOps specialists — with the same vetting bar, retention numbers, and engagement model.
English-fluent by default
The Philippines is the third-largest English-speaking country in the world. Incident reports, runbook updates, and standup summaries read the way they would from any US team member.
Real time-zone overlap
Most of our DevOps engineers work US business hours with 4-8 hours of real-time overlap with East and West Coast teams. On-call handoffs, deploy sign-offs, and infrastructure reviews happen live during shared hours rather than waiting 24 hours for an async response.
Deep DevOps talent pool
Cebu and Manila produce thousands of CS and IT graduates a year. The Philippines has a growing pool of engineers trained on cloud platforms, container orchestration, and infrastructure automation — the tools that define modern DevOps work.
Cultural alignment with US teams
Filipino engineers grow up on US business norms, US software products, and US engineering culture, so direct feedback, async collaboration, and technical ownership feel familiar from day one. These engineers integrate fast rather than needing constant management.
Applying tickets is not the same as owning the platform
Infrastructure work looks like it traveled well offshore until you hit a production incident and discover that nobody owns the runbooks, the Terraform state is a mess, and the on-call rotation is paging on noise because the alerting thresholds were never tuned. Building a DevOps function that holds up under real operational pressure requires a different bench. When you hire offshore DevOps engineers, this is the gap that decides whether you get a real platform team or a configuration management service. Here is what we test for, and what most offshore DevOps shops skip.
Pipeline ownership, not ticket-closing
Offshore DevOps contractors who execute tickets are not the same as DevOps engineers who own the pipeline. We hire for engineers with a documented track record of driving deployment frequency improvements and cutting pipeline run times, not just implementing what someone else designed.
Real Kubernetes fluency over YAML pasting
Anyone can copy a Kubernetes manifest from the documentation and apply it. We test for engineers who understand why pods are OOMKilled, how to design a namespace structure that scales, when to use a DaemonSet versus a Deployment, and how to debug a cluster that is degrading under production traffic.
Terraform that survives a second engineer
We screen for DevOps engineers who write modular, state-managed Terraform that a new team member can pick up without a three-hour handoff. Most offshore infrastructure code is one engineer's style guide applied inconsistently. We filter for the people who write infrastructure like they expect to hand it off.
Security that is part of the pipeline, not a sign-off step
Real DevSecOps integrates scanning, secrets management, and IAM hygiene into the CI/CD process, not as a gate at the end of a release. We hire for engineers who set up Trivy, SOPS, and least-privilege IAM policies as default, not as afterthoughts prompted by an audit finding.
Observability that makes on-call survivable
We hire for engineers who can design an alerting strategy that pages on the right things, build dashboards that answer the question during an incident rather than after, and write runbooks that let a generalist engineer resolve a P1 without waking up the senior architect.
Owns the infrastructure roadmap, not just the backlog
The best DevOps hires push back on feature requests that will create infrastructure debt, proactively propose the migration away from legacy tooling, and make a cost/reliability case to engineering leadership. We hire for engineers who treat the platform as a product with its own roadmap.
Hire dedicated DevOps engineers for the work that keeps the pipeline moving
Most DevOps hiring conversations skip past the actual work. Do you need a CI/CD engineer who can cut your pipeline time in half, a Kubernetes specialist who can stabilize your cluster under production traffic, a Terraform engineer who can bring your cloud infrastructure under version control, or a platform engineer who can build the internal tooling that makes your developers faster? Our DevOps engineers ship across all of it. Here is what we get hired for most often.
CI/CD pipeline engineering
Building and maintaining the pipelines that get code from commit to production reliably. Our DevOps engineers write GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and Jenkins pipelines that include automated testing gates, security scans, image builds, and zero-downtime deployments. They reduce pipeline run times, fix flaky stages, and build the rollback mechanisms the team needs on a bad deploy day.
Container orchestration and Kubernetes
Designing, deploying, and operating Kubernetes clusters at a scale that matches the product. Our engineers write Helm charts, configure Horizontal Pod Autoscaling, manage namespace isolation, tune resource limits, and debug the pod crashes and OOMKill events that show up under real traffic. They set up staging and production cluster parity so the environment gap stops causing surprises.
Infrastructure as code with Terraform and Ansible
Writing the Terraform and Ansible that turns your cloud environment from a collection of clicked-together resources into version-controlled, reproducible infrastructure. Our engineers design module libraries, manage state backends, implement drift detection, and build the Ansible playbooks that keep server configuration consistent across environments without manual intervention.
Cloud platform management (AWS, Azure, GCP)
Managing the cloud account structure, IAM policies, networking, and cost controls that keep a growing platform secure and affordable. Our DevOps engineers right-size resources, implement Reserved Instance and Savings Plans strategies, set up AWS Organizations or Azure Management Groups for multi-account hygiene, and build the guardrails that stop cloud costs from compounding invisibly.
Monitoring, observability, and alerting
Standing up the observability stack so the on-call team knows what broke before a customer files a ticket. Our engineers deploy Datadog, Prometheus and Grafana, or the ELK stack, instrument applications with OpenTelemetry, and design the alert thresholds and runbooks that make on-call sustainable. They eliminate alert fatigue so pages mean something.
Platform engineering and developer experience
Building the internal developer platform that makes your engineering team faster: self-service environment provisioning, standardized service templates, local development parity with production, and the golden path that lets new engineers ship on day one. The DevOps work that pays dividends over years, not just on the next release.
Eight DevOps specializations, one staffing partner
Most platform teams need more than one specialization. Hire dedicated CI/CD engineers, Kubernetes operators, Terraform specialists, and SREs from a single vetted bench. Mix and match seniorities as your infrastructure roadmap requires.
CI/CD Pipeline Engineers
Specialists who own the build, test, and deployment pipeline end to end. They write GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and Jenkins pipelines that ship reliably, reduce build times, and integrate security scanning without slowing the developer feedback loop. The person you hire when the release process is the bottleneck.
Kubernetes and Container Engineers
Engineers who design, deploy, and operate Kubernetes clusters in production. They write Helm charts, configure autoscaling, manage namespace isolation, tune resource limits, and debug the pod crashes and memory issues that show up under real traffic. Fluent in EKS, AKS, GKE, and self-managed clusters.
Infrastructure as Code Engineers
Terraform and Ansible specialists who turn your cloud environment into version-controlled, reproducible infrastructure. They design module libraries, manage remote state, implement drift detection, and write the Ansible playbooks that keep configuration consistent without manual intervention.
Cloud Platform Engineers
Engineers who own the cloud account structure, IAM, networking, and cost controls for AWS, Azure, or GCP. They right-size resources, implement savings strategies, build multi-account hygiene, and set up the guardrails that prevent cloud costs from compounding. Certified across all three major cloud platforms.
Observability and SRE Engineers
Site reliability and observability specialists who instrument your stack, build the alerting rules that mean something, and design the runbooks that make on-call sustainable. Fluent in Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, and the ELK stack.
DevSecOps Engineers
DevOps engineers with a security specialization who integrate SAST, DAST, dependency scanning, and secrets management into the CI/CD pipeline. They implement container image scanning with Trivy, manage secrets with Vault or AWS Secrets Manager, and keep the OWASP top 10 out of production.
Platform Engineers
Engineers who build the internal developer platform: self-service environment provisioning, standardized service templates, local development parity, and the golden paths that let new engineers ship on day one. The hire that multiplies every other engineer on the team.
DevOps Leads and Heads of Infrastructure
DevOps leadership for teams big enough to need it: defining the infrastructure roadmap, owning the reliability SLOs, partnering with engineering on the platform strategy, and managing a pod of DevOps engineers. The person who turns a group of infrastructure firefighters into a real platform team.
QA expertise tuned to your industry
As a software testing company that has been around for over a decade, we have placed dedicated QA engineers into nearly every industry that ships software. Domain knowledge cuts onboarding time in half, so we match testers to projects where they have already shipped real coverage.
SaaS & Scale-ups
B2B SaaS QA is our home turf. QA engineers on the bench have shipped Playwright suites for onboarding flows, admin consoles, billing pipelines, and dashboards on multi-tenant platforms at every scale from seed-stage to public companies. They understand role-based access testing, tenant isolation, and what enterprise buyers expect to see in a SOC 2 audit.
Kubernetes and Terraform by default, plus every other tool the platform needs
Kubernetes and Terraform are the defaults for new infrastructure work, and most of our DevOps engineers ship in them daily. Whether you want to hire a DevOps engineer to build your CI/CD pipeline from scratch, a Kubernetes specialist to stabilize your cluster, a Terraform engineer to bring your cloud under version control, or an SRE to own your observability stack, the bench covers every layer. Pick what you need. We will match a DevOps engineer fluent in it.
Hire dedicated QA engineers, two ways
Most clients start with a single dedicated QA engineer and grow into a full QA team. When you hire an offshore testing team this way, you get full-time testers in the Philippines who sit on your standups, work your hours, and ship coverage against your release calendar. Both options are our staff augmentation model at the core: dedicated, long-term QA engineers embedded in your team rather than freelancers, shared resources, or a project shop on the side.
Dedicated QA engineer
Full-time, exclusive, sits on your standups.
- Full-time QA engineer assigned only to your project
- Works your hours, your tools, your CI pipeline
- Joins your standups, reports to your engineering lead
- We handle payroll, HR, equipment, retention
- Replace within 30 days if it isn't a fit
Dedicated QA team
A full offshore testing team, embedded as one pod.
- 2-10 QA engineers staffed together as one pod
- Mix of manual, automation, SDET, and performance roles
- Operates as a QA team inside your product org
- Scale up or down by a head with 30 days notice
- Account manager you can escalate to in the US
How to hire a dedicated DevOps engineer from Full Scale
We skip the 3-6 week recruitment cycle and the cold sourcing entirely. Our bench of senior DevOps engineers in the Philippines is already built and vetted, and every step below has a named owner on our side.
Discovery call
30 minutes with our team. We learn your product, your infrastructure stack, the seniority level you need, and whether you want a CI/CD specialist, Kubernetes engineer, Terraform engineer, cloud platform engineer, or a generalist DevOps hire. We don't pitch on the call, we walk through what you actually need from a hire.
DevOps engineer match
We pull 1-3 pre-vetted DevOps engineers from the bench whose stack, seniority, and prior infrastructure experience line up with what you described. You see their full case studies, infrastructure portfolio, and Terraform or CI/CD code samples if they're relevant.
Technical interview
You interview the candidates the way you would interview any senior hire: portfolio walkthrough, a real infrastructure exercise (design a deployment topology, debug a cluster issue), a Terraform or Kubernetes code review, and a conversation about observability strategy. Pass anyone you don't believe in.
Contract & onboarding
Sign once. We handle every contract, payroll, equipment, and HR detail in the Philippines so you don't have an offshore entity to manage. You just get a DevOps engineer.
First infrastructure PR shipped
Your DevOps engineer joins your standups, gets access to your repo and cloud accounts, and ships their first meaningful infrastructure change in week one. Our delivery managers stay involved to make sure ramp-up doesn't stall.
Full Scale vs the other ways to hire a QA engineer
Every hiring path has trade-offs. Here is how a dedicated QA engineer from our software testing company compares against the alternatives most teams consider first when they want to hire QA engineers.
| Feature | Full Scale | Freelancer / Upwork | Testing agency | US recruiter / FTE hire |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-vetted senior QA bench | ||||
| Playwright fluency by default | varies | |||
| Time to first hire | 7 days | 1-3 days | 2-4 weeks | 6-12 weeks |
| Dedicated full-time, not shared | ||||
| Founder-led product oversight | ||||
| Sits on your standups, your tools | ||||
| Long-term retention | 93%+ | low | varies | varies |
| Replace within 30 days if it's not a fit | ||||
| Handles payroll, HR, equipment | ||||
| US-based account management | n/a | |||
| Typical fully-loaded cost vs US | ~40-50% | varies | ~70-90% | 100% |
When offshore QA is the wrong call
Most pages like this would tell you offshore QA is always the right move. It is not. Below are the cases where we have either passed on a project ourselves or told the client they should not hire dedicated testers from anyone, us included. If any of these match what you are doing, we will say so on the discovery call rather than sign you up and hope it works out.
You don't have a real release cadence yet
Very early stage exploration where the product changes weekly is the wrong fit for a dedicated QA engineer. What you need is the founding engineer running smoke tests by hand. A long-term QA hire needs accumulated product context to be productive, and that context is exactly what you do not have yet.
Your work is genuinely on-soil regulated
Certain DoD contracts, ITAR-covered systems, and a narrow slice of regulated workloads require US persons on US soil. If your test data touches classified systems or PII flows in those domains, we will tell you on the call, not after the contract.
The scope is fixed and short
Think a one-week regression sweep, a single mobile app certification pass, or a short audit of an existing test suite. Hire a freelance contractor or a specialist QA agency for those. Dedicated QA engineers earn their value over months and years, and a short fixed-scope job rarely runs long enough to pay back the ramp-up.
You can't actually fill a QA engineer's time
If you only have 10 hours of well-defined test work a week, a dedicated full-time QA engineer will end up idle or pulled into work you didn't budget for. That ends badly for both sides. Part-time engagements and fractional QA hires exist for this reason, and we are not them.
Real DevOps engineers, named and vetted
A sample of the engineers on our team with DevOps and cloud expertise. These are real Full Scale engineers working remotely from across the Philippines, and you'll meet candidates like them during your interview round.
A senior engineer with 16 years of experience who integrates containerization and cloud tooling into full-stack .NET and Angular projects.
A software engineer who ships React and Node.js projects with Docker containers, GitHub Actions pipelines, and AWS infrastructure as a standard part of his workflow.
A senior engineer with 13 years managing AWS infrastructure and deployment pipelines for Node.js and PHP applications.
A senior engineer with 11 years who owns CI/CD pipeline setup and Jenkins automation as a core part of every React and Node.js project he ships.
A senior engineer with 16 years of cloud and DevOps tooling across AWS, Docker, GitLab CI, Jenkins, and CircleCI on PHP and Laravel backend projects.
A senior engineer with 11 years deploying Vue.js and Node.js applications on AWS and Heroku with structured CI/CD pipelines.
The numbers behind a QA staffing partner that actually works
From the people we actually staff teams for
Full Scale's team was pivotal in elevating our facility management software. Their expertise turned complex challenges into seamless functionalities, enhancing user experience and operational efficiency.
The team at Full Scale brought our vision to life with their product skills. They helped us navigate technical and design requirements with ease, resulting in a robust platform our users trust.
Deeper guides to offshore hiring and DevOps
Offshore software development costs
The real all-in numbers behind offshore rates and what DevOps hiring actually costs.
The ROI of offshore development
The math behind 50-80% development cost reductions, applied to engineering teams.
Staff augmentation explained
How dedicated offshore engineers integrate with your existing team without the overhead of a full outsourcing engagement.
Offshore development mistakes
The nine self-inflicted mistakes that turn offshore DevOps engagements into expensive problems.
How to choose an outstaffing company
Five questions that cut through the vendor pitch and reveal whether a staffing partner will actually deliver.
Dedicated team model explained
The dedicated team model versus staff augmentation — and why the distinction matters less than most vendors claim.
Everything you wanted to know about hiring DevOps engineers
Hire a dedicated DevOps engineer who has actually shipped production infrastructure before
Book a 30-minute discovery call with the staffing company that has been placing dedicated engineers from the Philippines since 2018. We'll learn what you're building, walk you through which CI/CD specialists, Kubernetes engineers, Terraform engineers, or cloud platform specialists are on the bench, and you'll meet candidates within a week. You won't get pressure or a sales pitch on the call.