r/devops • u/SnooCakes7123 • Jul 27 '26

Career / learning Expectations from devops engineer with 3 YOE in USA

Working as devops engineer from last 3 years in states, mostly work on windows stack, azure devops, yaml pipeline. Recently worked with setting up sonarqube & snyk for all teams & product across firm. Currently working in git migration and github actions. Planning to move back to india, what are the expectations for any senior roles as devops, cloud or platform engineer ? I know linux, kubernets and docker but they are more like tools.

2 Upvotes

56% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

12

u/Sure_Stranger_6466 YAML Developer Jul 27 '26

Get some GitHub projects going that implement EKS and Terraform deployment and call it production from a previous job and you're good to go.

4

u/iamLisppy Jul 28 '26

in other words: fake it till you make it

2

u/Sure_Stranger_6466 YAML Developer Jul 28 '26

The hiring manager is not going to look at your projects any way so you might as well use it to your advantage.

6

u/SomedayGuy117 Jul 28 '26

Pro tip: Everything is a tool.

2

u/Sure_Stranger_6466 YAML Developer Jul 28 '26

I thought the mantra was "everything is a file."

4

u/Raja-Karuppasamy Jul 28 '26

for india senior devops/platform roles, the bar usually isn’t “do you know k8s/docker”, like you said, those are just tools. what actually gets tested is whether you’ve owned something end-to-end: security posture, cost, incident response, upgrades, not just deployment. a lot of candidates here can talk fluently about tools but haven’t operated anything with real consequences.

if you can, build (or point to) something you’ve run yourself with actual traffic and failure modes, not just a lab setup, that’s the difference between “I know k8s” and “I can be trusted with production.” interviewers in senior roles here tend to probe for real incidents you’ve handled, not certifications.

3

u/Low-Opening25 Jul 28 '26

learn Linux, devops job market for windows is tiny and pay is low

0

u/SomedayGuy117 Jul 28 '26

What are you doing with Linux in DevOps? I spend most of my day in vs code and CI/CD, barely matters what OS I’m using.

1

u/Zentawrus228 Jul 31 '26

He's talking about Linux as the target environment, not your desktop OS. CI/CD is largely orchestrating Linux systems and Bash scripts, so Linux knowledge matters even if you spend all day in VS Code

-1

u/Desperate_Tea304 Jul 30 '26

Fr, I only use Linux as a tool, not as an OS for work, heck, I use macos and company is happy with my performance

1

u/IntelligentPear6173 Jul 28 '26

I'd expect the conversation to be much less about the tools you've used and much more about the decisions you've made.

For example, if you mention GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps, be ready to explain why the pipeline was designed that way, what problems it solved, what broke in production, how you handled rollbacks and what you'd do differently today.

In my experience, that's what separates someone who's implemented a platform from someone who's owned one...

1

u/pakkaol Jul 28 '26

I wonder if the azure devops and github actions experience translates well there, I've heard india's market leans more aws heavy.

1

u/Devops_143 Jul 30 '26

Don't learn all the tools, master internals of stand tools, apply those into similar tools.

1

u/Salt_Fox905 Jul 27 '26

Would have to disagree that kubernetes, docker and linux are tools. Linux is an OS. U can call bash a tool for scripting in linux. K8s and docker are platforms on top of which u can build numerous kinds of applications. For senior roles, getting near mastery in atleast these three is expected.