Roles · Release Engineer · Junior
13 core skills, 51 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: Cloud & Infrastructure, DevOps & CI/CD, Observability & Monitoring.
Grouped by area. The label on the right is the expected depth: Awareness, Working, Advanced or Expert.
Knows basic Docker concepts for release engineering and can apply them in typical tasks. Uses standard tools and follows established team practices. Understands when and why this approach is applied.
Knows basic Helm chart concepts for release engineering and can apply them in typical tasks. Uses standard tools and follows established team practices. Understands when and why this approach is applied.
Knows basic Kubernetes core concepts for release engineering and can apply them in typical tasks. Uses standard tools and follows established team practices. Understands when and why this approach is applied.
Knows basic Terraform concepts for release engineering and can apply them in typical tasks. Uses standard tools and follows established team practices. Understands when and why this approach is applied.
Understands basic ArgoCD concepts for managing release deployments through the GitOps workflow. Follows team procedures for monitoring sync status during releases, verifying deployment health, and checking rollout progress in ArgoCD. Uses existing Application manifests to trigger and observe release deployments across staging and production environments.
Understands the blue-green deployment concept and its advantages over rolling update. Knows how to switch traffic between environments. Can execute and roll back a simple deployment.
Understands the canary deployment concept: gradually increasing traffic to the new version. Knows how to monitor canary and make rollout or rollback decisions.
Creates basic CI/CD workflows in GitHub Actions: lint, test, build. Configures trigger events (push, PR, schedule) and uses ready-made actions from the marketplace.
Knows basic GitLab CI concepts for release engineering and can apply them in typical tasks. Uses standard tools and follows established team practices. Understands when and why this approach is applied.
Knows basic Jenkins concepts for release engineering and can apply them in typical tasks. Uses standard tools and follows established team practices. Understands when and why this approach is applied.
Understands progressive delivery concepts: canary, blue-green, feature flags as deployment risk reduction tools. Knows the main tools in the ecosystem.
Knows basic SLI/SLO/SLA concepts for release engineering and can apply them in typical tasks. Uses standard tools and follows established team practices. Understands when and why this approach is applied.
Knows Git flow, trunk-based development, and branching strategies for release processes. Can work with release branches and the hotfix process. Understands how to organize branches for parallel development.
Not assessed by the team, but part of the self-assessment and the development plan.
51 skills get a higher expectation or become core when moving from Junior to Mid-level. The biggest jumps first.
} in the open competency matrix: 51 skills across 5 levels. The matrix is free for individuals and stays free.