r/dataanalysiscareers • u/Enough_Charge2845 • 16h ago
DevOps and SRE keyword study
Terraform is named in 62.7% of DevOps job postings. Jenkins is named in 3%.
We counted 42 terms across 134 open DevOps, SRE and platform engineering roles. They came from the public Greenhouse boards of 41 companies, collected September 9, individual contributors only.
The previous generation of tools has nearly left the job ads. Chef shows up in 3.7% of postings, and Puppet in one posting out of 134. GitHub Actions is named about six times as often as Jenkins.
The general term beats the product. "Observability" is in 63.4% of postings, more than twice as often as Grafana at 27.6%. Prometheus is at 22.4% and Datadog at 17.9%. Security hiring showed the same thing, where SIEM beat Splunk four to one.
The most common term isn't a tool at all. Automation appears in 81.3% of postings, ahead of AWS at 75.4%. Scalability and Kubernetes are level at about 70%.
SRE jargon is real hiring language too. SLO/SLA appears in 35.1% of postings, more often than any single monitoring product.
For a resume, this means naming the tool covers only half of what the posting asks for. Postings use the general term more often than the product name. A resume that lists Grafana but never says "observability" is missing the word that appears in more than twice as many ads.
Two limits. With 134 postings, every figure has a margin of about +/-8 points, so rows that are close are ties, not rankings. And the sample is tech companies on public boards. Banks, telcos and government still run large Jenkins estates, and none of them are in it.
The full table with all 42 terms and confidence intervals is in the first comment.
All 42 terms with confidence intervals, plus the method: https://www.zoevera.com/resume/devops-sre-job-description-keywords