What did he mean by DevOps?
That had to come before the referral.
A friend was looking for the first operations hire at a growing company. He wanted somebody hands-on who might later build a team. I knew the market and probably knew some candidates.
The title did not tell me enough.
At Shutterstock, I was hiring full-stack developers into the DevOps team. They were some of the strongest developers in the company. The job crossed code, infrastructure, automation, and the systems behind deployment.
My friend might have meant something different: an operations-first engineer who could automate, write some code, handle deployments, and make changes inside the application when necessary.
Both jobs could be called DevOps.
They were not the same search.
The difference changed the interview, the level, the people who might fit, and what success would look like after six months.
I asked for the actual job description and listed the work I thought he might mean. Once he explained it, I gave him the one solid name that came to mind and promised to keep thinking.
I also admitted why the referral list was short. People who could do this work were hard to find. The good ones were people I wanted to hire too.
That was the New York startup market at the time. Companies were moving more infrastructure into software, but the people who understood both sides were still rare. Everybody used the same title and competed for a small group with different skills inside it.
The first recruiting step was not searching harder.
It was defining the job.