DevOps vs. SRE vs. Platform Engineer
Three titles for overlapping infrastructure work, often used interchangeably in JDs. DevOps is a culture of developers and operations working together, and as a job title it usually means CI/CD pipelines and cloud infrastructure. SRE (from Google) is about reliability measured with numbers: SLOs, error budgets and incident response. Platform Engineering builds internal tools and 'golden paths' so other developers can ship without asking for help.
How to tell them apart on a resume
DevOps Engineer
CI/CD pipelines, Terraform, AWS or Azure, Jenkins or GitHub Actions, automating deployments.
SRE
SLOs, error budgets, on-call, incident response, postmortems, monitoring, reducing toil.
Platform Engineer
Internal developer platform, Backstage, self-service, developer experience, other engineering teams as their customers.
The question that settles it
“Who were your main customers: the release process, the production system's uptime, or the other developers in the company?”
Read the full definitions
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