A DevOps engineer introduces processes, tools, and methodologies to balance needs throughout the software development life cycle, from coding and deployment to maintenance and updates.
Development teams and IT operations teams can have different skills and different goals. Developers want to introduce new features to an application, while operations teams want to preserve the stability of an application once it is released.
DevOps is all about the unification and automation of processes, and DevOps engineers are instrumental in combining code, application maintenance, and application management. All of these tasks rely on understanding not only development life cycles, but DevOps culture, and its philosophy, practices, and tools.