Role-specific guide

DevOps / SRE CV Guide + Tailored Template (2026)

DevOps and SRE CVs are graded on reliability and cost moved, not tools listed. Recruiters scan for uptime, deploy frequency, MTTR, and infra spend. 'Managed AWS infrastructure' tells them nothing; name the SLO you held.

Keywords to include (if honest)

  • Cloud: AWS / GCP / Azure, be specific (EKS, ECS, GKE, Lambda)

  • IaC: Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Ansible

  • Containers + orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, ArgoCD

  • CI/CD: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CircleCI

  • Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, ELK

  • Reliability: SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident response, on-call

  • Security + cost: IAM, secrets management, FinOps, autoscaling

Only include skills you can defend in an interview. Inflated skill lists fail the first phone screen.

What this CV needs to have

  • A reliability number: uptime / SLO, MTTR, or incidents reduced

  • A delivery number: deploy frequency, lead time, or pipeline duration

  • A cost number: infra spend reduced (with %, and the lever you pulled)

  • Scale context: services, clusters, requests/sec, environments

Bullets: before and after

Weak

Managed Kubernetes clusters and CI/CD pipelines on AWS.

Strong

Ran 3 EKS clusters (120 services) at 99.95% availability; rebuilt CI/CD on GitHub Actions + ArgoCD, raising deploy frequency from weekly to ~25/day.

Weak

Reduced cloud costs by optimising infrastructure.

Strong

Cut AWS spend 34% (~$18k/mo) via Karpenter spot autoscaling, rightsizing, and killing idle non-prod after hours, with zero SLO regressions.

Weak

Improved monitoring and incident response.

Strong

Introduced SLOs + error budgets and Prometheus/Grafana alerting; reduced P1 MTTR from 95 to 22 minutes and cut pages 40% by deleting noisy alerts.

Project ideas (if yours is thin)

  • A public Terraform module or Helm chart with real downloads

  • A homelab k8s cluster written up (GitOps, observability stack)

  • A blog post on an incident postmortem you ran (sanitised)

  • A contribution to a CNCF project, however small

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