Engineering
DevOps Engineer CV: what employers ask for
DevOps and platform roles are judged on reliability, speed of delivery and cost. Screeners look for infrastructure you built and ran, what it improved and how you worked with developers. Tool names alone say little, because nearly every DevOps CV lists the same ones.
From real postings
We read 87 DevOps Engineer job postings from 46 companies on 6 November 2026. The most named asks were Monitoring / observability (62), Terraform / IaC (58) and Python (56). 37 postings stated years of experience; the middle value was 5.
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What a strong DevOps Engineer CV looks like
Start here if you are editing a CV today. The evidence for each point follows below.
Section order, top to bottom
- HeaderName, email, phone, city, and a link only if it shows infrastructure code you wrote.
- SummaryTwo or three lines: your title, years of experience, your cloud, and what you improved for the teams you support.
- ExperienceMost recent first. Bullets about systems you built or ran, with before and after: deploy time, incidents, cost, recovery time.
- SkillsGrouped: cloud, infrastructure as code, containers, CI/CD, monitoring, languages.
- CertificationsCloud or Kubernetes certifications, if the posting names them. They support experience; they do not replace it.
- EducationDegree and year, kept short. Few postings in our sample mentioned one.
The summary
Name your cloud and one result you are proud of. Monitoring and infrastructure as code were the two most named asks in our sample.
DevOps engineer with five years of experience on AWS. I manage our infrastructure in Terraform, run Kubernetes clusters for 30 services, and built the monitoring our on-call team relies on.
Skills: show them, do not just list them
Monitoring, Terraform or similar tools, Python, Kubernetes and CI/CD each came up in more than half the postings we read. Show each through a change you made and what it improved.
Weak and strong bullets
Illustrative rewrites, not real candidates. Use your own work, and only numbers you can back up.
Weak: Managed AWS infrastructure with Terraform.
Stronger: Moved 40 hand-built AWS resources into Terraform modules, so new environments take 20 minutes instead of two days.
Why it works: Infrastructure as code with a clear before and after.
Weak: Improved CI/CD pipelines.
Stronger: Split and cached the monorepo build in GitHub Actions, cutting average pipeline time from 28 to 9 minutes.
Why it works: A measured improvement to a pipeline other engineers use every day.
Weak: Set up monitoring.
Stronger: Built Prometheus and Grafana dashboards with alert rules for 12 services, reducing time to detect incidents from hours to minutes.
Why it works: Monitoring work tied to how fast problems are found.
What DevOps Engineer job postings ask for
Counted from 87 real postings, not guessed. When you paste a posting into Resymetry, it checks each of these asks against your CV and marks it as shown, only listed, or missing.
| Skill or ask | Postings naming it | Only as nice to have |
|---|---|---|
| Monitoring / observability | 62 of 87 | 1 |
| Terraform / IaC | 58 of 87 | 2 |
| Python | 56 of 87 | 3 |
| Kubernetes | 51 of 87 | 4 |
| CI/CD | 46 of 87 | 6 |
| AWS | 41 of 87 | 2 |
| Go | 33 of 87 | 2 |
| GCP | 28 of 87 | 3 |
| Linux | 28 of 87 | 2 |
| Distributed systems | 26 of 87 | 1 |
Show 8 more
| Skill or ask | Postings naming it | Only as nice to have |
|---|---|---|
| Docker | 26 of 87 | 1 |
| Roadmap | 22 of 87 | – |
| Metrics / KPIs | 21 of 87 | 1 |
| Azure | 20 of 87 | – |
| Machine learning | 20 of 87 | 2 |
| Cross-functional work | 18 of 87 | – |
| Stakeholder management | 17 of 87 | 1 |
| Budget | 15 of 87 | – |
Postings titled DevOps, site reliability (SRE), platform, infrastructure and cloud engineer are counted together here, because employers use the titles for overlapping work.
How we counted
On 6 November 2026 we read 87 live DevOps Engineer postings from 46 companies, through their public job boards (Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby). A posting counted when its title matched the role. We took at most three per company, so no single employer sets the result.
A skill counts once per posting, when it is named outside the benefits and company boilerplate. Matching is by keyword, so read the numbers as “named in”, not “strictly required”. “Only as nice to have” means it appeared only under a heading such as “Nice to have” or “Bonus”. 51 of the 87 postings had such a heading, so that column is a floor.
By location on the posting: 42 US, 10 UK, 7 India, 28 elsewhere or remote. Most employers in the sample are technology companies, which skews the result towards their stacks.
Companies sampled: Anduril, Asana, Ashby, Bloomreach, Calendly, Chime, Cloudflare, Coinbase, Deliveroo, Discord, Dropbox, Duolingo, Elastic, Faire, Figma, Fivetran, Fluxx, Gemini, GitLab, GoCardless, Graphcore, Gusto, HackerRank, InMobi, Intercom, Modal, MongoDB, Okta, OpenAI, Paytm, Perplexity, PostHog, Reddit, Redwood Materials, Relativity, Roblox, Runway, Scale AI, SpaceX, Stripe, Supabase, Synthesia, Thoughtworks, Toast, Twilio, Zscaler.
The script that produced these numbers is scripts/role-postings.mjs in the Resymetry repository. It stores counts only, never the text of a posting.
What employers look for in a DevOps Engineer CV
Screeners check these first. Each one should be visible in your job entries, not only in a skills list.
- Infrastructure as code in production, usually Terraform, Pulumi or CloudFormation.
- Container platforms: Docker and Kubernetes, with the depth made clear (using, configuring or running clusters).
- CI/CD pipelines you designed or improved, with the effect on release speed or safety.
- Monitoring and incident response: metrics, logs, alerts, on-call and post-incident work.
- Cloud cost and security awareness, such as rightsizing, access control and secrets handling.
4 common DevOps Engineer CV mistakes and how to fix them
Listing Kubernetes without saying what you did with it.
Fix: Say whether you deployed to clusters, wrote manifests and Helm charts, or ran and upgraded clusters yourself.
No numbers on delivery or reliability.
Fix: Use real measures: deploy frequency, build time, uptime, incident count or recovery time.
Ignoring cost.
Fix: If you reduced cloud spend, say by how much and how.
Writing as if you worked alone.
Fix: Show how developers used what you built, such as a self-service pipeline or shared templates.
Starting from scratch, or the layout is the problem rather than the content? There are free ATS CV templates to start from.
Know your chances for DevOps Engineer roles
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DevOps Engineer CV questions
- Which certifications help a DevOps CV?
- Cloud certifications such as AWS or Azure, and the CKA for Kubernetes, are commonly listed in postings. They help most when your job history shows the same skills in use.
- How do I show Kubernetes experience honestly?
- State the level: deploying workloads, writing manifests and charts, or running clusters. Each is valuable, and being clear avoids awkward interview questions.
- What numbers matter on a DevOps CV?
- Deploy frequency, pipeline time, uptime, recovery time and cloud cost. Use only figures you actually measured.