DevOps / SRE
Keep things fast, reliable and always on.
DevOps and Site Reliability engineers automate delivery and keep production healthy.
What the work looks like
Building CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, incident response, reliability improvements.
Key skills
- Linux
- CI/CD
- Containers & Kubernetes
- Monitoring & alerting
- Incident management
Common tools
GitHub ActionsKubernetesPrometheus/GrafanaTerraformDocker
Pros
- Critical role — teams depend on you
- Great salaries with experience
- Calm-under-pressure people thrive
Cons
- On-call stress
- Credit goes elsewhere when things work
- Lots of tooling
A 12-month starter roadmap
Months 1–3
- • Linux & shell
- • Git
- • Networking
- • Python scripting
Months 4–6
- • Docker
- • CI/CD pipelines
- • Cloud basics
- • Monitoring stack
Months 7–12
- • Kubernetes
- • SRE concepts (SLOs)
- • Chaos testing project
- • Certification
Reality check
Students like: Being the hero during incidents.
Students dislike: Getting paged at 2am.
Hardest part: Balancing speed and stability.
Common myth: DevOps isn't a separate team — it's a culture you help build.