DevOps/SRE CVs should show reliability, delivery speed, observability, cost control, and platform ownership.
This guide is a role-specific companion to the general CV structure: IT CV template (Romania).
TL;DR
- Put these early: incident response, CI/CD, IaC, and observability.
- Numbers help (MTTR, downtime, lead time), but verifiable signals are also good.
- Don’t list tools without context: connect them to outcomes.
Quick checklist
- Clear headline: “DevOps Engineer” / “SRE” / “Platform Engineer”.
- 3–6 strong bullets: CI/CD, IaC, observability, incident handling.
- Mention cloud/containers + basics of networking/security (as applicable).
Recommended structure (DevOps/SRE)
- Header (clean links; GitHub helps if you have IaC projects)
- Summary (2–4 lines: environments you worked in + strengths)
- Experience (reliability + delivery)
- Selected projects (optional)
- Skills (Cloud, IaC, CI/CD, Observability, Security)
- Certifications (short, if relevant)
What a good DevOps bullet looks like
A strong bullet says: what you changed, where, how you measured it, what improved.
Examples:
- “Implemented canary deploys for service X with fast rollback, reducing downtime during releases.”
- “Standardized logs/metrics/traces and alerting for critical services, reducing triage time in incidents.”
No numbers? Use verifiable signals:
- fewer incidents, cleaner alerts, faster rollback, less manual work, better reproducibility.
Bullet library (DevOps/SRE)
CI/CD & delivery
- “Built CI/CD pipelines with automated checks and staged deployments, reducing release risk.”
- “Implemented blue/green or canary deploys with fast rollback, reducing downtime during releases.”
- “Standardized environment configuration to reduce “works on my machine” issues.”
- “Introduced build/test caching and parallelization, improving feedback speed.”
Infrastructure as Code
- “Migrated infrastructure to IaC (Terraform/…), reducing drift and improving reproducibility.”
- “Built reusable IaC modules and conventions, speeding up new projects.”
- “Added policy-as-code guardrails (tagging/networking), reducing misconfigurations.”
Observability & incident response
- “Introduced logs/metrics/traces and alerting, reducing time-to-debug during incidents.”
- “Created dashboards and runbooks for critical services, reducing MTTR.”
- “Defined SLOs and symptom-based alerts, reducing alert fatigue.”
Security & compliance
- “Improved secrets handling (rotation/access), reducing the risk of leakage.”
- “Added dependency/container scanning in CI, reducing vulnerabilities shipped.”
- “Standardized least-privilege access across environments with better auditability.”
Cost & performance
- “Optimized cloud costs via rightsizing and cleanup, reducing monthly spend.”
- “Improved autoscaling behavior during peaks and stabilized service startup time.”
- “Introduced caching/queueing to reduce load on critical services.”
Sub-role examples
SRE (reliability)
- “Improved incident response by standardizing runbooks and postmortem actions.”
- “Reduced noisy alerting by switching to SLO-based thresholds and better routing.”
Platform engineer
- “Built “golden paths” for deployments (templates + guidelines), reducing variation across teams.”
- “Created shared provisioning blueprints, accelerating product teams.”
Common mistakes
- The CV is only a tool list, not outcomes.
- “Kubernetes” without explaining what you actually did (deploys, scaling, policies, observability).
- No mention of CI/CD, IaC, or incident response/observability (at least 2–3 should show up).
Useful keywords (use only what you actually did)
- Cloud: AWS/Azure/GCP
- Containers: Docker, Kubernetes
- IaC: Terraform, Ansible
- CI/CD: GitHub Actions/GitLab CI/Jenkins
- Observability: Prometheus/Grafana/ELK/OpenTelemetry
- Security: secrets management, IAM, scanning
DevOps CV template (copy/paste)
FAQ
Should I list certifications?
Not required. If you have relevant ones (cloud/security), add them briefly. Impact matters more.
How do I describe impact without sensitive details?
Use ranges (“minutes → seconds”), proportions (“fewer incidents”), and operational outcomes (rollback speed, reproducibility, cleaner alerting).
