Roles · DevOps Engineer · Junior

What a Junior } should know

1 core skills, 63 in total. Expectations per skill, and what changes at the next level.

This page lists what a Junior } is expected to know and do, skill by skill. Core skills are the ones a manager and peers assess in a review cycle; the rest count only in self-assessment. Main areas: DevOps & CI/CD.

1core skills
62additional skills
1skill areas
0%at Advanced or Expert
Assess myself as Junior Full role matrix

Core skills for a Junior

Grouped by area. The label on the right is the expected depth: Awareness, Working, Advanced or Expert.

DevOps & CI/CD · 1

GitOps Practices Awareness

Understands GitOps concept: Git as single source of truth for infrastructure and deployment, pull-based deployment model. Knows basic tools: ArgoCD, Flux. Understands the difference from push-based CI/CD (Jenkins, GitLab CI).

Additional skills

Not assessed by the team, but part of the self-assessment and the development plan.

Algorithms & ComplexityAnsibleApache KafkaAPI DocumentationArgoCDAsync ProgrammingAWSBlue/Green DeploymentCanary DeploymentCDN & Edge ComputingChaos EngineeringChatGPT / ClaudeCode Quality & RefactoringCode ReviewContainer Security ScanningCursor IDECustom Business MetricsData StructuresDatabase IndexingDesign PatternsDisaster Recovery DesignDockerDocumentation as CodeE2E TestingELK StackFeature FlagsGit AdvancedGitHub Actions / GitLab CIGitHub CopilotGitLab CI/CD AdvancedGraphQL DesignHelmIntegration TestingJenkinsJWT / OAuth2 / OIDCKubernetes AdvancedKubernetes CoreLoad BalancingMemory ManagementMultithreadingNetwork FundamentalsOn-Call ManagementOOP & SOLID PrinciplesOpenTelemetryOWASP & Application SecurityPostgreSQLPrometheus & GrafanaPrompt Engineering for CodePython Web FrameworksQuery OptimizationRedisREST API DesignSecrets ManagementSecure Coding PracticesSLI / SLO / SLAStructured LoggingSystem Design FundamentalsTerraformType Safety & Type SystemsUnit TestingVPN & Network IsolationWebSocket API Design

What changes at Mid-level

63 skills get a higher expectation or become core when moving from Junior to Mid-level. The biggest jumps first.

See the Mid-level page →
Run this with your whole team
Self-assessment plus manager and peer reviews against the same matrix, gap analysis and next-level readiness for every engineer. Team Pro is free for 14 days; individual tools stay free forever.
Start a team trial (14 days free) Send to my manager

} in the open competency matrix: 63 skills across 5 levels. The matrix is free for individuals and stays free.