Career roadmap
DevOps Engineer Roadmap
Linux, containers, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and observability — the operations path from scratch.
Timeframes assume a typical part-time pace. Faster or slower is fine — the order is what matters.
Linux & networking
Weeks 1–6The terminal is the job. Filesystems, processes, permissions, shell scripting, and how packets actually move.
- You can administer a remote server without a GUI
- You can trace a request from browser to process and back
Containers & IaC
Weeks 7–13Reproducible everything: containerize applications and describe infrastructure in code instead of clicks.
- You can containerize an app you didn't write
- You can stand up cloud infra from a .tf file and tear it down clean
CI/CD pipelines
Weeks 14–19Automate the path from commit to deploy: build, test, scan, release — with rollbacks that work.
- A push to main deploys itself through a tested pipeline
- You can explain blue-green vs rolling deploys with a straight face
Orchestration at scale
Weeks 20–26Kubernetes fundamentals — pods, services, ingress, autoscaling — and when you genuinely don't need it.
- You can deploy, expose, and scale a service on a cluster
- You can argue for the simpler architecture when k8s is overkill
Observability & SRE practice
Weeks 27–31Metrics, logs, traces, and alerts that wake the right person. Close the loop with incident thinking.
- Your lab project has dashboards and alerts, not just uptime hope
- A portfolio of pipelines and infra repos that prove operational maturity
Keep reading
Make your GitHub survive a recruiter's 90-second review
Recruiters spend about 90 seconds on your GitHub before forming a verdict. Here's exactly where those seconds go — and how to win each one.
The 7 code dimensions that decide your hireability score
DevProfile scores every analysis across seven dimensions of your actual code. What each one measures, why reviewers care, and how to raise it.
Get the version of this roadmap built from your repos
DevProfile analyzes your code, finds where you actually are on this path, and orders the next steps by score impact.