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DevOps / Platform Engineer: skills in demand in German IT freelance projects 2026

13% of the analysed IT freelance engineering projects look for a DevOps / Platform Engineer – 2,028 projects, rank 1 of 16 roles. In October 2026 it was 12% (−2.9 percentage points from the month before). Below are the skills these projects ask for, which of them are typical for the role, and how demand develops.

By . Data: 52,306 project listings from German IT freelance project boards, May 2026 – October 2026, of which 15,798 are engineering projects. Published , last updated .

What the role covers

DevOps and platform engineers build and run the platforms software runs on: CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes or OpenShift clusters, infrastructure as code, site reliability engineering and DevSecOps. Every project counts exactly once, under the role that is its main requirement – the title and the required skills decide. How all roles are delimited is explained in the overview of all developer roles.

The most requested skills

The 15 most frequent skills of the 2,028 projects of this role. The bar is the share of projects that mention the skill. Blue skills are typical for the role – asked for here at least three times as often as in engineering projects overall. Grey skills are also in demand in other roles. The black tick shows how often the skill is requested across all engineering projects. Languages and soft skills are left out.

Under each skill: how often the role lists it as required, and its share across all engineering projects.

  1. Kubernetesrequired 52% · all 21%60%
  2. CI/CDrequired 41% · all 27%51%
  3. Linuxrequired 31% · all 10%36%
  4. Terraformrequired 23% · all 7.6%31%
  5. Monitoringrequired 20% · all 8.7%31%
  6. Infrastructure as Coderequired 21% · all 7%28%
  7. Ansiblerequired 20% · all 4.6%27%
  8. DevOpsrequired 20% · all 10%26%
  9. Grafanarequired 17% · all 6.3%26%
  10. Pythonrequired 18% · all 20%25%
  11. Dockerrequired 17% · all 14%23%
  12. Automationrequired 16% · all 7.1%23%
  13. Helmrequired 16% · all 5.3%21%
  14. AWSrequired 16% · all 11%20%
  15. GitOpsrequired 15% · all 3.7%20%

Typical for the role – asked for at least three times as often as in engineering projects overall – are Ansible (27%), GitOps (20%), Terraform (31%), Grafana (26%), Infrastructure as Code (28%), Helm (21%).

Also asked for in other roles and taken for granted here: Kubernetes (60%), CI/CD (51%), DevOps (26%), Python (25%), Docker (23%), AWS (20%).

How demand develops

Share of DevOps / Platform Engineer projects among the engineering projects per month, by the month of the first listing. Single months fluctuate; a shift of less than one percentage point is not a trend yet.

  1. May 202611%
  2. June 202611%
  3. July 202614%
  4. August 202612%
  5. September 202615%
  6. October 202612%

Remote share

Since July 2026, 84% of this role's projects state a remote share. Of those, 46% are fully remote, 53% hybrid and 1.1% fully on site. All roles and cities compared: How remote are IT freelance projects?.

Contract length and start

Since July 2026, 67% of this role's projects state a contract length: 6 months in the median, 41% of them a year or longer. 40% of the projects name an option to extend, and 47% of those stating a start want to begin immediately. All roles compared: IT contract length in Germany.

For English speakers

Since July 2026, 4.4% of this role's projects (78 projects) say German is not needed or name English as the only language; 55% of those are fully remote. 54% demand German, 42% name no language. All roles and cities compared: English-speaking IT contracts in Germany.

Hourly rate

What listings for this role name as an hourly rate – median, middle half, day rate and the course month by month – is on the page DevOps / Platform Engineer hourly rate.

Related roles

Roles that share many of the shown skills with this one – often within reach with a few additional skills.

How to use the data for your profile

  1. Check your profile against the blue skills: they are what clients look for in this role.
  2. Grey skills with long bars are taken for granted – if you have them, they belong in your profile.
  3. Look at the related roles: a few additional skills often put many more projects within reach.

Projectmatch matches new projects against your profile automatically and shows, per project, which of the required skills your profile covers. Browse current projects or try it now.

All roles compared: Most in-demand developer roles in German IT freelance projects. See also: Monthly IT freelance market report, IT contractor rates in Germany, AI freelance & contract jobs in Germany and Most in-demand IT skills in German freelance projects.

Method

An AI model assigns each project exactly one role from its title and required skills – the main requirement – or marks it as not an engineering project. The skills come from the AI analysis of the project descriptions; spelling variants are merged into one skill. A skill counts as typical for the role when its projects mention it at least three times as often as engineering projects overall. The figures are updated every month.