During your time as a senior DevOps engineer, you’ve faced and overcome many challenges. You’re a problem-solver—tearing down silos, enabling rapid feedback, and creating a path for progress and optimization.
Some challenges, however, are more intimidating than others: like compressing everything you’ve achieved into one single page, for example.
If crafting a top-notch resume seems intimidating, don’t worry—we’ve got you covered. With our senior DevOps resume templates and cover letter writing tips, you’ll be able to achieve a level of information density you never thought possible.
Why this resume works
- Sure, you’re an IT whizz and have mastered just about every skill required to keep things running smoothly. However, the DevOps world is a swamp, meaning recruiters can still pass over your resume if you don’t really show them what you bring to the table.
- Arnold’s is the model senior DevOps engineer resume here; by throwing in the link to his GitHub profile in the header, he can showcase his coding skills and previous projects. The end goal? Recruiters will assess his coding style and proficiency and decide if he’s worth a shot.
Related resume examples
What Matters Most: Your DevOps Skills & Experience
As a senior DevOps engineer, you tackle more tasks in a day than some of us handle in an entire week. Between mentoring junior engineers, working to cut down infrastructure costs, and optimizing system scalability, you’ve got your hands full—and it’s all thanks to your extensive set of skills.
The challenge is to summarize this in a short resume. After all, every company conforms to a unique set of DevOps practices, so there’s no one winning strategy for you to follow here.
The aim is to convince hiring managers that you’re what they need. To pull this off, focus on skills and address each language, platform, tool, and technology you’re familiar with, and be specific.
9 best senior DevOps engineer skills
- Python
- Kubernetes
- AWS
- Jenkins
- Docker
- Git
- Grafana
- Ruby
- Azure
Sample senior DevOps engineer work experience bullet points
As a senior DevOps engineer, your work involves breaking down silos, increasing automation, and optimizing the systems development life cycle. The good news is these are all objectives with quantifiable results that you can easily showcase.
Tangible achievements backed by numbers are attention-grabbing and persuasive, and for a DevOps engineer, they’re real and important measures of your success.
For example, every DevOps engineer implements CI/CD pipelines—but not everyone does it well enough to reduce the software release cycle time by 29%. Adding metrics will help hiring managers understand the value you can add to their team.
Try these examples:
- Implemented automated testing frameworks across multiple departments, increasing test coverages by 34%
- Spearheaded a cloud migration project to transition essential legacy apps to the cloud, resulting in a 12% cost reduction
- Led a team in advocating for and migrating to a microservices architecture which resulted in a 22% reduction in infrastructure costs
- Delivered a centralized log management system using the ELK Stack, bringing down analysis times by 38%
Top 5 Tips for Your Senior DevOps Engineer Resume
- Don’t over-skill
- No one can be an expert in 20 different fields, so overdoing it can cause hiring managers to doubt that you’re an expert in any. Instead, focus on what you know. For example, if you’ve worked with AWS but only dabbled in Azure, then just list AWS.
- List relevant certifications (AWS, CKA)
- Tools and platforms like AWS, Azure, Docker, and Kubernetes all have their own certifications. If you’re applying to a role connected to a specific technology, list your certification in it as proof of your expertise.
- Tailor your title, skills, and summary
- The first stage of the application process is mostly about showing recruiters that your skills and experience are relevant to the job. If the particular job focuses on AWS, for example, it’s important to focus your resume on that and its services: EC2, S3, Lambda, etc. Make sure they’re right at the top of your skills list.
- Include relevant links
- There are a lot of external profiles and portfolios a DevOps engineer can link to on their resume, from GitHub and LinkedIn to your personal opinion blog on the latest workflow automation technologies. Pick the ones that strengthen your application to the role and place them beneath your name and title on your resume template.
- Prioritize experience over education
- Although some senior DevOps engineer job posts may still require a college degree, it’s important to prioritize showcasing your relevant on-the-job experience. Your skills in Azure, for example, will often be more important to recruiters than your IT degree.
It’s much more effective to demonstrate your soft skills through specific examples than to just list them. For example, you can hint at your leadership or teamwork skills early by including relevant experience on your resume about coaching, mentoring, and leading teams.
Generic summaries can waste space on your one-page resume, so if you include a summary statement, tailor it to the specific company you’re applying to. It’s also an excellent space to set the tone by mentioning a career-defining achievement.
Start by reading through the job description and adding the skills it mentions that you have experience with. If you can think of any other toolkits or management systems that you could use, you can add them too.
