Should my CV say 'DevOps Engineer', 'Platform Engineer' or 'SRE'?

Use the title on the job spec you're applying to. Internally the roles overlap, but UK job boards still index on those exact titles. If the team you're targeting hires SREs, lead with SRE in your headline; if it's a platform team, lead with platform engineer. The bullets do the real work of showing what you did. A common mistake is to use one job title across all applications and let the recruiter guess; better to maintain three lightly varied versions of the headline and personal summary, and keep the bullets identical.

How important is Kubernetes on a UK DevOps CV in 2026?

Important but not universal. If you're targeting fintech, mid-to-large SaaS or any consultancy, Kubernetes experience is effectively required. If you're targeting smaller scale-ups, a competent ECS or Cloud Run background is often enough and sometimes preferred. The mistake is claiming Kubernetes when you've only run a tutorial cluster. Hiring managers will ask about cluster upgrades, networking, and the worst incident you handled. If you don't have production K8s experience, position yourself for ECS or serverless roles and be honest in the summary about the gap.

Do I need certifications like AWS or CKA on a DevOps CV?

They help at junior and mid-level, especially if your work history is short on named cloud platforms. The AWS Solutions Architect Associate and CKA are the two that UK hiring managers consistently recognise. At senior level, certifications carry far less weight than a CV that shows real production operations and incident work. If you have certifications, list them in a single line at the bottom; if you don't, don't worry about them and instead invest in one well-documented project with a public write-up.

CV Example · Tech · UK 2026

DevOps Engineer CV Example UK

DevOps CVs are the most tooling-heavy I see, and that's the problem. After 12 years placing platform and infrastructure engineers across UK fintech, scale-ups and consultancies, the CVs that get shortlisted in 2026 don't read like a Helm chart. They read like an operations story: what you ran, how reliable it was, how much it cost, and what you changed to make it better. Hiring managers want to see incident response, cost control, and the boring discipline that keeps production standing on a Sunday morning. They are not impressed by a logo wall of every CNCF tool. Pick the platforms you genuinely owned and tell me what they did under load.

By Alex · 12-year UK recruiter · Updated April 2026

Example header

Marcus Adeyemi · Senior DevOps Engineer · 9 years · Edinburgh / Remote

Personal statement / Professional summary

Platform engineer with nine years running production infrastructure for UK SaaS and regulated fintech. Strong on AWS, Kubernetes and Terraform, with deep practical experience of incident response, cost control and the unglamorous work of paying down platform debt. Last year, took the platform team's monthly AWS bill down by £42k while improving deployment frequency from 8 a week to 24, mostly by killing two legacy environments and rewriting the CI pipeline. Comfortable on call and comfortable saying no to a feature team's bad request.

Bullet point examples

Strong bullets follow the same shape: action verb, specific scope, quantified outcome. Use these as patterns, not as copy-paste templates — the numbers must be your own.

Lead platform engineer, regulated fintech

Reduced AWS bill by £42k/month (28%) over 9 months through reserved-instance planning, S3 lifecycle policies, killing two legacy environments and right-sizing 90+ services.
Improved deployment frequency from 8 a week to 24 by rewriting the CI pipeline (GitHub Actions, Buildkite) and introducing trunk-based delivery for backend services.
Cut mean time to recovery from 47 minutes to 11 minutes through better runbooks, on-call training and a standard incident-channel template.

Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code

Migrated 60 microservices from ECS to a multi-tenant EKS cluster with Argo CD, with documented rollback and a phased cutover that ran 11 weeks with zero customer-facing incidents.
Rewrote 14 Terraform modules into a versioned internal module library, enforcing policy through OPA and reducing 'cowboy' infrastructure changes by an estimated 80%.

Reliability and incident response

Authored the company's incident command standard, now used across 6 engineering teams, including a single-page severity matrix and a written postmortem template.
Led 4 high-severity incident reviews in 2025 with engineering and product leadership, with two preventative actions tracked to completion in each.

Security and compliance

Implemented automated CIS benchmark scanning across all production AWS accounts, closing 140 findings in the first quarter and providing the audit trail accepted by ISO 27001 surveillance.
Rotated production database credentials across 30 services using HashiCorp Vault, removing all long-lived secrets from CI.

Earlier role: SRE at SaaS scale-up

Designed and ran the on-call rota for a 20-engineer org, reducing weekend pages from 14 a month to 3 through alert tuning and SLO adoption.
Built the company's first SLO dashboard in Grafana, surfacing the noisiest 4 services and giving feature teams the data to fix them.

Skills section — what to list

Mirror the skills exactly as they appear in target job ads. The ATS reads this section literally — synonyms hurt match scores.

AWS (EKS, ECS, RDS, Lambda, IAM)KubernetesTerraformHelm and Argo CDGitHub Actions / Buildkite / CircleCILinux administrationBash and Python scriptingPrometheus, Grafana, LokiOpenTelemetryIncident response and SLO designHashiCorp VaultPostgreSQL operationsCost optimisation (FinOps basics)Network fundamentals (VPC, TLS, DNS)ISO 27001 / SOC 2 evidence collection

DevOps Engineer-specific CV mistakes that get you binned

× Listing 40 tools without context. A long CNCF logo wall reads as junior or padded. Pick what you genuinely operated and put it next to a result.
× No on-call story. UK platform hiring managers in 2026 want to know how you behave at 3am, not just that you can write a Terraform module.
× Skipping cost numbers. Infrastructure spend is a board-level conversation in most UK companies. If you've cut a bill, name the figure.
× Treating 'migrated to Kubernetes' as a self-explanatory bullet. Tell me what you migrated from, why, and whether anything broke.
× Calling yourself 'DevOps' but having no application code experience. The strongest UK platform CVs in 2026 show you can read and modify the services you operate, not just deploy them.

Common questions

Should my CV say 'DevOps Engineer', 'Platform Engineer' or 'SRE'?: Use the title on the job spec you're applying to. Internally the roles overlap, but UK job boards still index on those exact titles. If the team you're targeting hires SREs, lead with SRE in your headline; if it's a platform team, lead with platform engineer. The bullets do the real work of showing what you did. A common mistake is to use one job title across all applications and let the recruiter guess; better to maintain three lightly varied versions of the headline and personal summary, and keep the bullets identical.
How important is Kubernetes on a UK DevOps CV in 2026?: Important but not universal. If you're targeting fintech, mid-to-large SaaS or any consultancy, Kubernetes experience is effectively required. If you're targeting smaller scale-ups, a competent ECS or Cloud Run background is often enough and sometimes preferred. The mistake is claiming Kubernetes when you've only run a tutorial cluster. Hiring managers will ask about cluster upgrades, networking, and the worst incident you handled. If you don't have production K8s experience, position yourself for ECS or serverless roles and be honest in the summary about the gap.
Do I need certifications like AWS or CKA on a DevOps CV?: They help at junior and mid-level, especially if your work history is short on named cloud platforms. The AWS Solutions Architect Associate and CKA are the two that UK hiring managers consistently recognise. At senior level, certifications carry far less weight than a CV that shows real production operations and incident work. If you have certifications, list them in a single line at the bottom; if you don't, don't worry about them and instead invest in one well-documented project with a public write-up.