Roles · Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) · Junior

What a Junior } should know

1 core skills, 61 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
60additional 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 from SRE perspective: knows how declarative deployments through Git ensure reproducibility and audit trail. Understands how GitOps helps in incident response (quick rollback through git revert).

Additional skills

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

Algorithms & ComplexityApache KafkaAPI DocumentationAPM ToolsArgoCDAsync ProgrammingAWSCapacity PlanningChaos EngineeringChatGPT / ClaudeCode Quality & RefactoringCode ReviewContinuous ProfilingCursor IDECustom Business MetricsData StructuresDatabase IndexingDesign PatternsDisaster Recovery DesignDockerE2E TestingELK StackGit AdvancedGitHub Actions / GitLab CIGitHub CopilotGrafana LokiGraphQL DesignHelmHigh Load ArchitectureIncident Response ProcessIntegration TestingJaeger / Grafana TempoJWT / OAuth2 / OIDCKubernetes AdvancedKubernetes CoreLatency OptimizationLoad 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 Isolation

What changes at Mid-level

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

See the Mid-level page →
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} in the open competency matrix: 61 skills across 5 levels. The matrix is free for individuals and stays free.