reliability, infrastructure and DevOps
What counts as an achievement for a DevOps engineer on LinkedIn
An achievement for a DevOps engineer is uptime, deploy frequency or cost, with the size of the fleet behind it.
- they screen on
- uptime, incident response, fleet size, deploy frequency, cost
- the decision
- They are deciding whether you have carried a pager for something as large and as broken as theirs.
- questions below
- 5
duty line
Responsible for maintaining infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines.
no fleet size, no uptime, no deploy frequency
achievement line
Ran 600 instances at 99.98% uptime, taking deploys from weekly to 40 a day and cutting spend $28k a month.
Same DevOps engineer, same career. The difference is that somebody asked for the numbers.
The 5 questions that produce those numbers
These are the questions a recruiter screening infrastructure hiring managers asks on a call. Answer them on paper and your profile writes itself.
the question
why it is asked
unit
1
What availability did you hold, and against what target?
reliability roles are hired on a number with 9s in it
%
2
How many incidents did you handle, and what happened to time to recovery?
MTTR movement is the clearest proof of an SRE
count and minutes
3
How large was the estate — services, clusters, nodes or spend?
it is how they size the environment you can survive
count or currency
4
What did deploy frequency or pipeline time do while you owned it?
delivery speed is what a platform team is funded for
deploys per day, minutes
5
Did you reduce cloud cost? From what to what?
infrastructure savings are the easiest result to verify
currency or %
Write your answer to each one down. A figure you cannot remember exactly is still better as a range than as a duty.
Why a DevOps engineer’s profile ends up with none of these numbers in it
Infrastructure work is invisible when it goes well, so it gets described as maintenance. You did not maintain it. You kept it up, at a size, at a cost.
A grader cannot fix this. It can only reword the lines already on the page, and those lines are the problem — there is no uptime figure in them for it to find. The numbers were never written down, so they have to be asked for.
See which of your own lines have no result in them
Paste your profile and the audit marks every line duty or achievement, and names the unit missing from each duty line. It is free, nothing is blurred, and we do not ask for your email.
Audit my profile, free