Night Shift Jobs in Chicago, IL

Entry‑level night shift DevOps or NOC technicians earn between $70,000 and $90,000 annually, mid‑level professionals earn $90,000 to $120,000, and senior engineers or managers typically see $120,000 to $160,000, depending on geographic location and industry specialization.

Key skills include proficiency with Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes for automation, along with strong incident‑response practices using PagerDuty or Opsgenie. Certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect, CompTIA Security+, Cisco CCNA, and Linux Foundation Certified Engineer are highly sought after for night shift roles that demand rapid problem resolution.

Many night shift positions allow remote work, but they require on‑call or virtual shift coverage. Employers often use tools like SolarWinds or Splunk for remote monitoring and schedule meetings through Teams or Slack to coordinate hand‑offs, ensuring continuous service without a physical presence.

Typical trajectories move from NOC Technician to Incident Response Analyst, then to Cloud Operations Engineer, and eventually to roles such as Site Reliability Engineer or Technical Lead. Continuous learning in automation and cloud architecture opens doors to higher management positions overseeing 24/7 service delivery.

Automation and AI‑driven incident response are reducing manual monitoring workload, while shift‑scheduling software improves workforce planning. The rise of edge computing and global SaaS platforms is creating new night shift roles that focus on real‑time data pipelines and distributed infrastructure maintenance.