My company's space is pretty crowded with competitors, but we're beating them because our service returns results in 78ms, while our competitors doing devops and running in Azure, etc. return in 2500ms.

That's because we have a dedicated ops team who concentrate on performance and scaling, and leave the devs to write code instead of managing servers.

Surely the devs focus on performance and scaling as well, if not at the level of managing servers? Having a dedicated ops team is a necessity, but it's important to keep developers in the loop on operations as well.

As the architect of the systems, I focus the designs on scalability and performance and the devs implement it. So, whether it's a dev or its an architect, someone has to be thinking about it. But having an ops background helps with knowing how to scale.