DevOps Engineer resume skills. The words recruiters search for.
The 19 skills, tools and credentials that come up in DevOps engineer job posts, sorted by type, and how to put them in bullets a recruiter believes.
By Nazir Elmurodov, Founder, LaunchCV · Updated
/ The list
Keywords by type. Use only the ones that are true for you.
Hard skills · 7
- Infrastructure as code (used in Ryan's sample resume)
- CI/CD (used in Ryan's sample resume)
- Linux (used in Ryan's sample resume)
- Bash (used in Ryan's sample resume)
- Python (used in Ryan's sample resume)
- Monitoring and alerting (used in Ryan's sample resume)
- Incident response (used in Ryan's sample resume)
Tools & software · 10
- AWS (used in Ryan's sample resume)
- Terraform (used in Ryan's sample resume)
- GitHub Actions (used in Ryan's sample resume)
- Jenkins (used in Ryan's sample resume)
- Kubernetes (used in Ryan's sample resume)
- Amazon EKS (used in Ryan's sample resume)
- Docker (used in Ryan's sample resume)
- Ansible (used in Ryan's sample resume)
- Prometheus (used in Ryan's sample resume)
- Grafana (used in Ryan's sample resume)
Licenses & certifications · 2
- AWS Certified DevOps Engineer (used in Ryan's sample resume)
- CKA (used in Ryan's sample resume)
19 of 19 appear in Ryan's sample resume. See where
/ How to use them
Put keywords in bullets, not just in a skills list.
A skills list tells the software you have a skill. A bullet shows a recruiter what you did with it.
AWS, Terraform
Weak: Skills: AWS, Terraform
Strong: Manage AWS infrastructure for 40 services entirely in Terraform, with every change reviewed through pull requests
CI/CD, GitHub Actions
Weak: Skills: CI/CD, GitHub Actions
Strong: Rebuilt CI/CD pipelines in GitHub Actions, cutting average build-and-deploy time from 28 to 9 minutes
Amazon EKS
Weak: Skills: Amazon EKS
Strong: Moved 25 services from EC2 to Amazon EKS with Helm charts and blue-green deploys, with no customer-facing downtime
Prometheus, Grafana, Incident response
Weak: Skills: Prometheus, Grafana, Incident response
Strong: Set up Prometheus and Grafana alerting with on-call runbooks for incident response; mean time to recovery fell from 70 to 25 minutes
Strong bullets come from Ryan's sample resume and our DevOps engineer bullet examples. Names and figures are illustrative.
/ Use them honestly
Keywords get you found. Proof gets you hired.
Mirror the job post's wording for skills you really have. If a DevOps engineer post asks for AWS and you've used it, say AWS, in the post's spelling, and show where.
Mirror the job post's wording
If a DevOps engineer post says "Terraform", write "Terraform", not a near-synonym — as long as it's accurate. Recruiters search for the post's exact term.
Only claim what you can back up
Expect to be asked about every term you list. If you couldn't spend two minutes on Infrastructure as code — what you did and what changed — leave it out.
Show it in a bullet
A skills list says you know Terraform. A bullet like the one under DevOps Engineer in the example above shows what you did with it.
No stuffing, no hidden text
Repeating a word or hiding keywords in white text doesn't make you a better match. A person reads the resume in the end.
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/ Questions
DevOps Engineer keywords, answered.
Something else? support@launch-cv.com
How many keywords should a DevOps engineer resume have?
There's no magic number. Ryan's sample resume uses all 19 terms on this page, because each one fit that job. Cover what your post asks for that you can back up, each where it fits; repeating a keyword doesn't help.
Should I copy keywords exactly from the job post?
Use the post's wording for skills you really have. If a DevOps engineer post says "AWS", write "AWS" rather than a synonym, so a recruiter searching for that term finds you. Don't add skills you don't have just because the post lists them.
Where should keywords go on my resume?
In your summary, a short skills section and, above all, the bullets under each job, where you show what you did with the skill. In Ryan's sample, AWS, Infrastructure as code and CI/CD are in the summary and Terraform shows up in a bullet under DevOps Engineer. Plain text in the body of the page is easiest for applicant tracking systems to read.
Which tools should I list on a DevOps engineer resume?
The ones you've used and the post mentions. Common ones in DevOps engineer posts include AWS, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Jenkins and Kubernetes. Name the tool in the bullet where you used it, not only in the skills list.
How should I list AWS Certified DevOps Engineer and CKA on my resume?
Spell them the way the job post does, and include both the abbreviation and the full name if you have room. Put licenses and certifications in their own section or next to your education, and only list ones that are current.
Keywords for related roles
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