Ukraine DevOps Talent Demand Q4 2025: What’s Happening?

As time honoured tradition in the Ukrainian Tech Segment goes – everything changes except for DevOps talent demand. Everybody wants some. The cheaper the better but not really.

• 5–7% of the entire Ukraine Tech Segment Talent Pool specialize in DevOps / SRE / Cloud infrastructure. That’s 25 thousand specialists on the market.

2025 is no different in that regard. At least Q1-Q3 going into Q4.

• Even when the market in general is very down and not much good is happening – everybody wants some DevOps talent.

It’s easy to understand why it is so.

• Tech projects are highly dependent on things going smoothly without a hitch. That’s what DevOps do.
• And to keep it that way you need a good DevOps engineer. Thus the demand. Thus the salary dynamics out of whack forever and ever.

Let’s look at how things are for DevOps Engineers during Q4 2025.

DevOps Talent in Ukraine: The State of Things

In a year when layoffs massacre developers across the board – DevOps remained one of the few roles that businesses couldn’t afford to cut or furlough.

Not because it was fashionable to keep them, but because losing them meant risking the entire operation and tanking the entire company.

The thing is:

• Demand consistently outstrips supply. 

• Even during wartime disruptions and partial mobilization, fintech companies report difficulty hiring senior DevOps/SRE engineers.

The best way to describe the position DevOps engineers are in the Ukrainian Tech Segment these days goes something like this:

• While everyone else panics, DevOps engineers just keep working.
• Losing your DevOps breaks production – literally. Things go down and don’t get up.
• Given the competition – that’s not a good thing.
• Given the market situation – that’s even worse.

And so we get the following situation:

• There’s an on and off hiring freeze almost across the board.
• The spreadsheets bleed red pretty much all the time. At this point they bleed red for shits and giggles too.
• Naturally, companies cut folks who are less directly connected to revenue and focus on essentials.
• But they never mess with DevOps engineers (in most cases). Because that will mess things up for the product.

Here’s a common scenario:

• When a CI/CD pipeline collapses, deployments stall for hours or days.
• As a result, uptime metrics plummet, customers churn.
• When a data center fails over poorly, you lose money by the second.
• No amount of front-end brilliance can patch an infrastructure meltdown.
• No sales genius can compensate for a system that can’t scale.

Where the Demand Is Coming From?

The demand for DevOps is coming from the hard reality of systems that must keep running NO MATTER WHAT. Plain and simple.

• You have a planet killer asteroid on a collision course, nah, we good, keep on runnin’. That level of “no matter what”.

Let’s look at the key niches where DevOps are in highest demand.

Banking

Banking Is brutal. It can make or break tech talent. It’s not even about technical skills per se – the tension that comes with working in finance and banking can eat your soul. But there’s a job to do so that’s that.

These companies quite literally manage money. They run on mission-critical legacy systems that have been running sometimes for decades.

• These systems are at a point that nobody fully understands what is in there anymore.
  • Even more so – nobody wants to break anything because it is going to be a cascade effect and you definitely do not want that to happen under any circumstances.
• Because of that – you can’t hand over that stuff to juniors fresh out of bootcamps.
• The thing is – most banking systems can’t be fully automated by the book. The system is too complex and laden with legacy components that might not gel with cutting solutions.

As a result, banking companies look for experienced engineers who can handle both sides of the spectrum:

• Handle old-school architecture – fun stuff like mainframes, COBOL, all sorts of byzantine network topologies;
• Implement modern cloud practices to boost performance and system resilience.

So basically there is always a situation when you need to merge old enterprise infrastructure and the new set of containerized microservices.

• Not everyone is wired to do that. Thus the demand.

Fintech

It is always tempting to pack banking and fintech in one section and pretend it is all the same. Well, it is not.

• Banking products are built upon complex legacy systems. From the infrastructure point of view, the systems are monstrous, Frankenstein-like entities with stuff bolted-on as time goes by. And the thing is – in most cases – these systems are running for decades already and will grow even more monstrous. That’s banking for ya.
• Fintech products are drastically different. The best word to describe it is “lean”. And if you really think about it – the other “lean” describes fintech well as well. But I digress.
• Fintech products are usually built in one piece. So it is less about dealing with some sort of legacy and more about creating a durable and resilient system. The one that can be efficient.

This aspect requires a different set of skills compared to what banking projects usually require.

But this also creates a rift in the talent pool.

• Not every DevOps with banking background can fit into modern fintech projects and vice versa.

Overall, modern fintech companies (neobanks, payments, crypto, RegTech, InsurTech) hire more than traditional banks.

There are several reasons for that:

• Ukraine’s National Bank’s Fintech Development Strategy 2025 pushes for further cloud adoption, data resilience, and incident response. That sounds like a DevOps area of competence.
• AI integration is another factor. Deploying ML models into production requires MLOps + DevOps convergence.
• PCI DSS, GDPR, ISO 27001 compliance create demand for automated audit and monitoring pipelines.
• Scalability is another demand driving factor. Neobanking applications handle millions of transactions daily. That requires continuous delivery and high uptime.

Data Science

Data Science is in the weird place in the Ukrainian Tech Segment.

• There are basically two of these – one civilian and one military. Take a guess why.

But the demand for both revolves around the same requirements.

• Data Science teams are only as effective as the infrastructure supporting them.

• A robust, secure, and scalable infrastructure is a must. It’s the bedrock of an efficient data science ecosystem.

The big driver for the current wave of Data Science DevOps Demand is the artificial intelligence adoption.

• Ukrainian companies already operate in high-pressure, high-resilience environments.
• Because of that, in addition to regular infrastructure challenges you get a bonus one.
• Model deployment pipelines demand real-time monitoring for performance and compliance.
• Given that pipelines work over terabytes of diverse data across borders and cloud regions – that’s quite a challenge just to hold the system together.
• You need to keep it from falling apart and avoid breaches, data contamination and other cybersecurity threats that befall on data science systems.

Cloud Infrastructure

The transition towards cloud computing and infrastructure has been a thing ever since the products fully switched towards high-volume SaaS business models with constant uptime and continuous development.

The challenge is that as time went by the cloud systems gained complexity and with it the high-profile talent demand with ever-increasing salaries.

The other Cloud Infrastructure DevOps talent demand driver is more peculiar.

• Ukrainian tech infrastructure is also affected by a bunch of grizzly savages with imperialist delusions wrecking everything in sight out of spite and insecurity. As if just keeping the system running wasn’t a headache enough.
• As a result, you also need to keep in mind such fun things as energy instability, network disruptions, and constant heightened security measures.
• This means two different kinds of infrastructure flexibility wrapped around one system.
• Cloud-native architecture, containerized environment, and multi-cloud strategy helps handling this kind of external volatility. But it’s a tall ask for tech talent to handle.

Consequently, business continuity and ways of maintaining it became the biggest thing for Ukrainian tech companies.

• In particular, companies look for hybrid and edge computing computing solutions that can deal with operational redundancy and provide rapid recovery if necessary.

Cybersecurity

A lot of things in cybersecurity overlap with DevOps duties to the point DevSecOps is its own distinct profession.

The thing is – it is no joke and complex computing systems always have some sort of vulnerability or an exploit that can be taken advantage of. You need to automate security into every layer of the software and infrastructure lifecycle.

Thus the demand for cybersecurity DevOps.

Basically, the demand revolves around three cornerstones:

• Build resilient multi-cloud infrastructure;
• Automate disaster recovery and incident response;
• Integrate Zero Trust architectures;

And this whole thing covers every single niche of the Ukrainian Tech Segment.

• Enterprise
• Fintech & Banking
• Defense & GovTech
• Data Science

The list goes on. But there’s a catch.

• The demand is at an all-time high.
• But the talent pool is not meeting the demand.
• DevSecOps skills are not something you can master at some bootcamp – it is a continuous empirical development that takes years.
• So the talent is rarer and it is much more pricey especially if we’re talking about large system DevSecOps architects.

What’s Next?

The biggest hurdle the current DevOps talent demand needs to handle is the scarcity of talent. This is an especially big problem for the Cybersecurity niche as DevSecOps are particularly rare and hard-to-hire-away types of talent.

Part of the solution is to provide more efficient talent on-site training so that junior and middle talent have a chance to learn the ropes on the job without breaking too many things in the process.

The other part of the solution lies in the education system and because of that it is essentially out of reach so there is no point to talk about it.

With that said, the war still goes on and mobilization still depletes whatever talent pool the Ukrainian Tech Segment has. That’s the biggest challenge and there is no way to work around it efficiently. This trend will continue into the future. Let’s hope that’s it is only the near future.