As a DevOps engineer, your job is to essentially close the gaps between software development, testing, and support. On a day-to-day basis you’ll be monitoring, optimizing, and sometimes managing the whos, whats, wheres, and hows of an IT project.
It’s not an easy career field. But it’s a job that pays excellently and has a high career outlook; Studies estimate a 22% job growth.
To prepare your DevOps resume for the next interview, it’ll require skills with various software programs and working with other software engineering departments to drive efficiencies. Today, we’ll be showing you examples of what a winning DevOps resume looks like. Use our suggestions to help you tailor your DevOps resume to match the job you’re aiming for.
When applying for a DevOps engineer job, your resume needs to demonstrate your ability to unify, automate, and manage software processes. This means you will have worked with different software programs to get a job done. In your resume, include your experience with these programs, along with any achievements that occurred as a result.
The skill section in this sample lists quite a few important skills that a DevOps engineer should have. But it also explains how these skills were used in their experience section. In your resume, list key relevant skills with software like Python, MySQL, or software automation, and talk about how using them brought positive results to the company.
Recruiters don’t just want to see your capabilities with certain software. They especially want to see how effective you are at using them. This sample lists how the use of various software resulted in things like “a 45% efficiency increase.” Include metrics of how much you reduced costs or labor and increased productivity or profit in your experience section.
Being a DevOps manager means that you will have done more than work with development/IT teams to test and improve quality and efficiency of programs. You will have led a team that has done the same thing. To get a managerial role in DevOps, show in your resume experience that you know how to effectively lead a team to deliver positive results for a company.
The resume in this sample describes the experience in leadership-related positions. This will catch a recruiter’s attention as they see capabilities to manage others. In your resume, explain your leadership roles, pointing out how large of a team you worked with and what was achieved.
Recruiters don’t just want to see your capabilities with certain software. They especially want to see how effective you are at using them. This sample lists how the use of various software resulted in things like “a 45% efficiency increase.” Include metrics of how much you reduced costs or labor and increased productivity or profit in your experience section.
The responsibility of this role is to ensure proper management, automation, maintenance, performance, and scalability of AWS cloud-based production systems. Recruiters want to see that you have the programming skills to help increase efficiency or reduce costs or labor. In the experience section of this sample, you see many bullet points explaining how certain operational functions were improved. For example, “eliminating 85% of manual work”, “reduced the service loading time by 97%”, or “increased the page speed by 15%.” Your resume should include the achievements you’ve reached by using AWS.
Because AWS DevOps is a more senior role, recruiters want to see job growth and leadership. Make sure you list any changes or promotions in your job titles, along with detailing leadership experience. For example, this sample mentions leading “a team of 4 DevOps engineers in the transition from GCP to AWS.”
Your resume needs to have strong action verbs relevant to the role so recruiters can see how you specifically contributed to an accomplishment. In the sample, you see verbs like “automated”, “managed”, and “implemented”. For an AWS DevOps resume, include action verbs like these when explaining your experience.
To succeed as a Kubernetes DevOps engineer, you’ll need to get used to working with the cloud. This sample explains how they have implemented different cloud-based services in their experience. Recruiters want to see that you’re well-versed with the software. Your experience should highlight how you’ve used cloud services successfully on the job.
Your resume will catch the attention of recruiters if it has skills that you’ll use on the job. This sample has skills like Linux and AWS, then explains how those were used to automate data. Talk about the skills you have that are necessary for this role in your resume.
To get your resume past ATS, you need to list keywords that are relevant to this position. This sample uses keywords like “Kubernetes” and “automated,” which are both necessary for the role. When making your resume, read through the job description to find other keywords you can use.
Since the DevOps role involves much work with various software programs, experience and skills with tools that help to manage those programs are key. Include those skills and how you’ve used them throughout your resume.
If you’re uncertain of which skills to include, the job description should help you out. It’ll tell you which skills the hiring company is looking for in an applicant. Try listing some of them; it’ll help you get past ATS. However, stick to using primarily hard skills. Soft skills are important to have, especially for upper-level roles, but technical skills should be what you focus more attention on.
This word cloud highlights the important keywords that appear on DevOps job descriptions and resumes. The bigger the word, the more frequently it appears on job postings, and the more 'important' it is.
Experience in data management, automation, and program quality testing are all critical skills needed for DevOps — after all, DevOps is short for Developer Operations, so anything that helps with improving the efficiency of developers is what you want. If your resume can display your success with many different programming tools and other departments’ data to drive efficiency, you’ll be one step closer to obtaining your next DevOps job.
Below are some tips to help you structure your perfect DevOps resume.
DevOps engineers need to do a lot of building, configuring, and testing programs. Doing so requires skill and experience with tools like OpenVZ/KVM, Hadoop, and the cloud. Therefore, it’s necessary to use action verbs that highlight your abilities with these tools.
Just make sure the verbs --and the following experience-- are related to DevOps. Other software engineer-related jobs use the same or complementary tools. So whichever ones you choose to use in your resume need to be useful for this exact role. However, if those action verbs from other roles happen to be connected to this one, use them in your resume.
For a full list of effective resume action verbs, visit Resume Action Verbs.
If you're a senior-level employee, or you're changing careers to become a DevOps, it's useful to add a paragraph at the top of your resume highlighting your most impressive accomplishments. This is called a resume summary.
Here's an example of a summary that can be used on a DevOps resume.
A resume summary is a totally optional section, and in most cases, it's better to leave it out of your resume than include it. For example, if you're a student or mid-level hire, you should not include a summary, and instead use the space to add to your work experience.
To learn how to write an effective resume summary for your DevOps resume, or figure out if you need one, please read Resume Summary Examples for Job Seekers: When To Include One.
You should use bullet points to describe your achievements in your DevOps resume. Here are sample bullet points to help you get started:
Developed and implemented heavily parallelized algorithms to resize and watermark 5MM+ images of different sizes using Amazon EC2
Designed and implemented 50+ E2E tests using Selenium & Protractor, simulating each user group's actions
Cut projected time for data analysis by one week by developing reusable ETL components using Pentaho Kettle
Designed and implemented an automated system for processing employee timesheets, eliminating the need for manual handwritten timesheets and resulted in a 10/hr per week time saving
Led full redesign of website with findings from customer segmentation and competitive research, increasing website leads by 200%
For more sample bullet points and details on how to write effective bullet points, see our articles on resume bullet points, how to quantify your resume and resume accomplishments.
