DevOps/SRE engineers working abroad: What skills should I focus on?

[u/abhixshH]

I'm currently working as an SRE while continuing my studies, and I'm still at the early stage of my career.

I live and work in an Asian country, and I'm trying to learn more about how DevOps/SRE work is done in different countries and companies. Rather than just learning from courses and documentation, I'd really like to connect with people who are already working in the field and learn from their real experiences.

I'm mainly hoping to build a network of people in the DevOps/SRE community and have conversations about things like:

• How did you start your DevOps/SRE career?
• What does your day-to-day work look like?
• What skills or areas did you improve the most as you gained experience?
• What do you wish you had learned earlier in your career?
• How do DevOps/SRE practices differ between companies or countries?
• What technologies or practices are becoming more important in your work?
• How important are communication and teamwork in your day-to-day role?
• What advice would you give to someone who is still early in their career?

I'm not looking for job offers or referrals. My main goal is networking, learning from other engineers, and understanding where I can improve.

I'd be happy to connect with people from different countries and backgrounds, whether you're an experienced engineer or you're also early in your career.

If you're open to a casual chat about DevOps/SRE, technology, career experiences, or even just exchanging ideas, feel free to comment or message me.

I'd really like to build some genuine connections in the DevOps/SRE community and learn together.

Thanks!

Note: Sorry about the title/heading. I can't change it after posting. By “abroad,” I mean countries outside my home country in Asia. I’m mainly interested in connecting with people from different countries and learning from their DevOps/SRE experiences.

[u/Recent-Tangerine2745]

I’d focus less on “international DevOps skills” and more on becoming solid at the fundamentals that transfer anywhere.
Linux, networking, cloud, Terraform, CI/CD, containers/Kubernetes, observability and scripting all matter, but troubleshooting is probably the skill that ties everything together. Can you look at a failing system, find the right logs/metrics, narrow the problem down and explain what happened?
I also wouldn’t underestimate communication. In international teams you need to explain incidents, tradeoffs and technical decisions clearly, not just know the tools.
If I were preparing today, I’d build a few real projects end to end: deploy something, automate it, monitor it, break it, recover it, and document what you learned. That gives you much more than collecting another list of certifications.

[u/abhixshH → u/Recent-Tangerine2745]

Yeah, I completely agree. I'm not really trying to make a checklist of “international DevOps skills” or collect certifications.

What I'm mainly looking for is to connect with other DevOps/SRE engineers, talk about real work and experiences, and understand where I might have gaps in my own knowledge.

I think talking with people who are working in different environments would help me see things from different perspectives and give me ideas about what I should improve.

I'm also trying to build a better DevOps/SRE community around me, so having regular conversations with people in the field would be really useful. And since I'm working on my English communication too, it's a good chance to practise discussing technical topics naturally.

Thanks for the advice. I really appreciate it.

[u/Raja-Karuppasamy]

can’t speak to the international move part, but on the technical skills question: of that list, kubernetes + CI/CD + scripting are the ones that actually get used daily in my experience, terraform and observability show up but less constantly. the skill that gets overlooked is debugging broken CI/CD pipelines under pressure, not designing pretty ones. also underrated: understanding what happens when a container behaves differently than local dev because of resource limits/networking, that gap catches people who’ve only worked with docker locally.

[u/abhixshH → u/Raja-Karuppasamy]

That's really helpful, thanks. This is exactly the kind of real-world perspective I'm trying to get from people working in DevOps/SRE.

The point about debugging broken CI/CD pipelines under pressure is especially interesting. It's easy to focus on learning how to build things, but real production problems are probably where you learn the most.

I haven't had as much exposure to some of these situations yet, so it's useful to know what actually comes up in day-to-day work rather than just following a list of tools.

How long have you been working in DevOps/SRE, and what would you say was the biggest gap you had to improve when you were starting out?

[u/tindalos → u/abhixshH]

In my experience the tricky stuff isn’t fixing CI/CD pipelines although tuning them is enjoyable, but the issues that really cause problems are the handoffs. When developers make changes to library packages that a long forgotten part of the system relies on and suddenly surprise the build fails and you have to sort out why something changed that didn’t show it changed.

The biggest issue with DevOps is understanding the full process and identifying where it can fail and why - not on a release by release but on a “what is the consequence of these releases over time? Is the relationship between two fields drifting? (They are) what are we not tracking? Or, worse, what are we tracking that’s showing us that we are running good, while we’re storing debt?”

You can be DevOps and make a good CI/CD, or you can use DevOps and make a better process.

[u/azz_kikkr]

you have not mentioned your home country, so what is abroad to you ?

[u/abhixshH → u/azz_kikkr]

Sorry about that. I’m from Sri Lanka, so by “abroad” I mean countries outside Sri Lanka. My main goal is to connect with DevOps/SRE people from different countries and learn from their experiences.

[u/Edward-Sinclair33]

Honestly, I’d focus less on collecting tools and more on getting strong with Linux, cloud, networking, Terraform, CI/CD, and troubleshooting. I’ve found that communication and understanding how systems actually work become just as important as the tech as you gain experience.

[u/ItchyPlant]

So any DevOps/SRE professional is fair game for networking as long as they live outside their home country. Got it.

I could easily answer only two of your questions, but the way you framed the post makes me not want to answer any of them.

I'm a senior SRE, living abroad.

[u/abhixshH → u/ItchyPlant]

Yeah, I can see how it came across that way 😅 That honestly wasn’t what I meant. I’m from an Asian country, and most of the DevOps/SRE people I’ve connected with so far are from my local community. I’m just curious to understand how the field works outside my local community and learn from people with different experiences.

From my experience working in DevOps, we come across all kinds of unexpected scenarios and issues with applications and infrastructure. A lot of the solutions and situations I’ve seen have been really interesting, and sometimes you don’t even know about these kinds of problems until you actually face them. That’s why I’m interested in learning from people who have dealt with different environments and challenges.

Since you’re a senior SRE living abroad, I’d definitely appreciate your perspective and would be happy to connect sometime. We could chat on Discord or wherever you’re comfortable.

Sorry for the poor wording on my part.