You might be an exception, but food for thought: the number one reason why my clients, when I was running a consulting business, couldn't find in-house DevOps f

You might be an exception, but food for thought: the number one reason why my clients, when I was running a consulting business, couldn't find in-house DevOps folks was an unwillingness to pay. At best, most places would pay line engineer rates--the same thing they'd pay for a Java or a Rails developer--for a skillset that's significantly broader than most (certainly not all, but most) line engineers at a given level of seniority and is significantly more in-demand. In the Boston area as an example, I regularly saw companies trying to get senior devops engineers at rates more appropriate for mid-level, and principals for hilariously under rate. (We're talking $140K offers for a senior devops engineer when the next place would offer $180K, and $160K for principals who could get $220K elsewhere.) To be fair, this is sometimes trickier because a lot of "devops engineers" are actually mouse-driven system administrators, so the means and medians often look odd. That somebody who does what I do, and somebody primarily doing things hand-o-matically, would have the same job title throws a wrench into one-to-one comparisons. But you can figure it out.