What skills does a DevOps engineer need?

Junior skills - the base every team expects

Use the Linux shell with confidence: files and permissions, processes, systemd services, logs with journalctl and tail. Know basic networking: ports, DNS, HTTP status codes, and tools like curl, ss and dig. Use Git every day (branch, merge, rebase). Write small Bash or Python scripts. Configure a web server such as nginx and a database such as PostgreSQL. Build a Docker image and run a container.

Mid-level skills - automation and delivery

Build CI/CD pipelines in GitHub Actions or GitLab CI that test, build and deploy an app. Write Terraform for real cloud resources (S3, IAM, EC2, VPC) and understand state and plans. Deploy to Kubernetes with Deployments, Services and ConfigMaps, and package with Helm. Add monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana, and write alerts that point to a real cause.

Senior skills - reliability and design

Design for failure: zero-downtime deploys, rollbacks, backups you have tested, and multi-region or multi-cluster setups. Manage secrets with a tool like Vault or AWS Secrets Manager and rotate them. Set SLOs, lead incident response and write clear postmortems. Keep cloud cost and security in mind in every change.

How to show these skills to an employer

A list of tools on a resume tells an employer little. A project tells them more: an nginx server returning 502 that you traced to a dead upstream, a Dockerfile you made smaller and safer, a CI pipeline you got green again. Write each one up in a few lines - the problem, what you changed, how you checked it - and put them on one portfolio page.

Real DevOps work to put in your portfolio

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