Engineering

The DevOps / SRE resume

Availability is your headline number. Say what you were on call for, how big it was, and what you did when it broke.

What screeners actually look for

Three things, in order of weight.

01

Availability and the scale behind it — nines are meaningless alone

02

A real incident: detection time, recovery time, follow-up fix

03

Cost reduction on infrastructure, which is increasingly the hiring reason

The three mistakes this role makes most

  • Listing tools (K8s, Prometheus, Terraform) with no environment size
  • Claiming 99.99% without saying of what, or over what period
  • No automation story — manual ops is exactly what they're replacing

Keywords worth including

Work them into your title, project descriptions and skills — don't pile them into a list.

availability SLOMTTRincident reviewIaCKubernetesobservabilitycapacity planningcost reduction

Templates that fit DevOps / SRE

Each cover is the template itself, rendered.

Strong headings organise ops, platform and incident work.

Reliable single column for enterprise ATS.

Dense and undecorated.

Common questions

How long should a DevOps / SRE resume be?

One page. Unless you have 10+ years and a genuinely full second page, the second page only dilutes the first. Put availability and the scale behind it — nines are meaningless alone above the fold.

What gets a DevOps / SRE resume rejected fastest?

Listing tools (K8s, Prometheus, Terraform) with no environment size. It is the single most common reason this role gets screened out, and fixing it matters far more than changing templates.

Can I generate a DevOps / SRE resume with AI?

Use AI for the first draft, then verify every claim and number yourself and reorder keywords against the target job description. AI handles speed; the content is still your responsibility.

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