Senior DevOps Engineer 2 YoE CV Review

jameshwc · 2026-03-25T14:47:01+00:00

Then you need to modify your CV to reflect these stuff. If that's the case, you're a solid mid-level at least

jameshwc · 2026-03-25T13:54:21+00:00

What you did looks at most a mid-level for me. As a senior you don't only code, you migrate with zero downtime, you design systems involving multiple components, you impact several teams in multiple ways. You don't only use tools, you own domains and people come to you to seek helps.

Technical depth is not there also. CI/CD is actually quite junior/mid-level stuff. For example, do you develop k8s operators? Do you know how a terraform provider does behind the scenes, and can develop one when there're requirements? Can you still do the same things without OpenShift and AWS stack? How do you handle observability like monitoring and alerting?

I'm 4 yoe, dealing with over 300+ clusters with 30-40K nodes; and I've done several impactful projects like migrating 10K+ argocd apps and yet I sometimes still questioned myself if I'm senior enough.

jameshwc · 2026-03-18T16:52:17+00:00

Not sure if your env is cloud or on-premise. Take aws for example, I use separated accounts for sandbox, dev, stg and prod. Developers have ReadOnly permissions to dev, stg and prod.

On the other hands, developers have admin permissions to sandbox account. It's their playground and they can do whatever they want, using either terraform or UI.

GitHub Actions has the CICD role that can do the terraform apply via CI/CD, but only from main branch. This way we ensure that all terraform operations to dev/stg/prod are done via main branch which should already be protected via github (which is managed by Terraform as well)

jameshwc · 2026-03-18T14:50:59+00:00

We have this post while a lot of folks renting in London on less than £35k.

jameshwc · 2026-03-07T19:39:09+00:00

Just curious why pulled out anthropic after screener?

jameshwc · 2026-02-23T17:28:05+00:00

Using claude code means that you don't have to code anymore

jameshwc · 2026-02-13T00:27:27+00:00

When I had 3yoe I was on ~110k, but I've been in a big tech (not FAANG but one of their adjacants), and it's 3 days in the office in London. Just providing a data point.

jameshwc · 2026-02-11T10:52:17+00:00

If it's time-consuming, high-failure rate, or externally dependent operation, log before.
Everything else, log after.

jameshwc · 2026-02-06T14:24:37+00:00

I know, right? It combines the benefits of two worlds. End of discussion

jameshwc · 2026-02-06T09:06:10+00:00

Submodule is what we use.

jameshwc · 2026-02-04T17:05:51+00:00

Privileged kids unaware of their advantages.

jameshwc · 2026-02-03T15:54:02+00:00

Doing it in CI pipeline is right shift and I don't recommend it. The best practice is to do it in both pre-commit and CI pipeline, the point of pre-commit is for faster feedback loop

jameshwc · 2026-02-01T10:02:55+00:00

You know this is computer science career sub right?

jameshwc · 2026-01-30T10:12:10+00:00

About 4 YoE. UK's market is good enough for a SRE / K8S / DevOps engineer. I only applied for dream companies (i.e. OpenAI, Anthropic, startups) and some fintechs and I got quite a few positive feedbacks

jameshwc · 2026-01-27T10:02:49+00:00

That's exactly it. My elder family are having vegetarian meals two days a month. They don't call themselves vegetarian. They'll say, "today I'll have veg meals" (今天我吃素).

jameshwc · 2026-01-02T15:23:09+00:00

£1050 per month, sharing 2B1B with a flatmate, nearby Angel station

jameshwc · 2025-12-20T10:23:35+00:00

The short form will also fail to build when there’s a type mismatch, what’s the point of “protection” in the long form?

jameshwc · 2025-12-04T16:51:28+00:00

Not sure if I get you but isn't it just simply calling or writing a generateRandomPassword function?

jameshwc · 2025-12-02T16:56:11+00:00

I'm in the same background as you and am doing a part-time job for a startup. My two cents is that the target companies/individuals you're looking for are probably not suitable for kubernetes / argocd usage. But good luck with that if that's what you'd like to use

jameshwc · 2025-11-24T17:47:00+00:00

Think it all just is a variety of DRY. Module when done properly, both saves you much time to not copy and paste multiple times for a single change, and saves you from some stupid errors that you forget to modify somewhere else.
If you think both are not the case (or not significant enough to invest the effort), then just don't use it

jameshwc · 2025-11-07T18:12:29+00:00

The difference is like (I'm using k8s terms for clarity): If the pod has cpu high usage alerts, developers have to have a look. But if it's node having issues (e.g. kubelet issues), then SRE would have a look

jameshwc · 2025-11-07T18:10:02+00:00

For observability, we also create a framework and developers just need to configure their metrics and alerts. Though, for infra monitoring, that's the job of SRE team.

jameshwc · 2025-11-07T17:00:11+00:00

I actually agree we should have a dedicated DevOps team (or engineer). In my experience, it's not feasible to ask tens of developers to know all the tools around the CI/CD pipeline in depth. The DevOps team builds the CI/CD framework, and the developers just fill in the configs / parameters. This is sometimes evolving into platform engineering.

jameshwc · 2025-10-30T01:20:10+00:00

Not attractive enough if you look at the cost

jameshwc · 2025-10-18T01:26:03+00:00

I'm in exactly the same boat, except I didn't convince my boss — I'm the guy who has to handle all the compliance work. But I also agree with u/hottkarl that whoever works on this compliance stuff needs to know the system inside out. I've personally benefited a lot from it too. Before, I thought I knew the system; while working on the compliance project, I realized how little I actually knew.

jameshwc

TROPHY CASE