One of seven role studies in the ATS Resume Keyword Study counts 3,518 job postings from 81 companies, term by term. Terms counted in more than one role are compared in the same-term comparison across roles.
Keyword study
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One posting weights these 42 terms differently from all 134. Paste yours against it and see which of its words your resume never uses.
Check My Resume134 open roles whose title names DevOps, SRE, platform engineering or infrastructure engineering, taken from 41 public company job boards and checked against 42 terms. Managers and program managers are not in it.
Each figure is the share of postings using a term at least once, so repetition inside one posting counts for nothing. At this sample size the ± column matters more than usual: intervals run to roughly eight points, which means neighboring rows are not meaningfully different. Read the bands, not the ranks.
Top twenty shown; the remainder are tabulated by category below.
A named product reaches further here than in any earlier study. AWS is number 2 of 42 at 75.4%. Every other study we have run is below, and two of them already had a named product near the top, so this is a difference of degree, not a reversal:
| Study | First named product | Rank | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| DevOps / SRE (this one) | AWS | 2/42 | 75.4% |
| security roles | AWS | 2/40 | 46.7% |
| software engineering | AWS | 6/45 | 41.3% |
| accounting roles | NetSuite | 12/30 | 36.6% |
| account executive | Salesforce | 11/43 | 29.2% |
| marketing | Salesforce | 11/44 | 23.1% |
| product management | Figma | 29/44 | 2.4% |
Infrastructure hiring names its stack more heavily than product or sales hiring does. It does not name it more heavily than security hiring, which the 212-posting security study already showed.
A practice still beats every one of them. automation leads at 81.3%, above 75.4% for AWS and 70.1% for Kubernetes, and scalability (72.4%) outranks Kubernetes too. The pattern from the earlier studies is dented here, not overturned.
The generic word beats the branded one, again. Observability is named in 63.4% of postings against Grafana 27.6%, Prometheus 22.4% and Datadog 17.9%. That is the same shape as SIEM against Splunk in the security study, where the generic term led by 4 times. Carry both forms on a resume.
The previous generation of tooling has almost gone. Jenkins appears in 3% of these postings, Chef 3.7%, and Puppet in 1 of the 134. Against that, Terraform is at 62.7%, ArgoCD 24.6% and GitHub Actions 19.4%. GitHub Actions is named roughly 6 times as often as Jenkins.
SRE vocabulary is real vocabulary. Toil appears in 26.9% and SLO, SLA or SLI in 35.1%, both ahead of several household tool names. Postmortems reach 12.7% and chaos engineering 6.7%.
Want this for one posting rather than the aggregate? Put your resume and that posting through the checker and it names the terms the posting uses that you do not.
The finding that Jenkins, Chef and Puppet have thinned out is real for this corpus and misleading outside it. These are 41 companies hiring through one modern ATS, overwhelmingly venture-funded product companies with recent infrastructure. They are the least likely employers in the market to be running a decade-old CI server.
Banks, insurers, telcos, government departments, defense contractors and their integrators are absent from this sample, and Jenkins, Chef, Puppet and Ansible run a great deal of production infrastructure inside them. Those employers also hire more DevOps engineers than the companies here do. If your experience is on that stack, it is an asset in the market this study cannot see.
The defensible reading: when applying to product companies, lead with Terraform, Kubernetes and the cloud you know. Keep the older stack on the page. It costs nothing and it is the entire requirement somewhere else.
| Term | Postings | Share | ±95% |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS | 101 | 75.4% | ±7.3 |
| Kubernetes | 94 | 70.1% | ±7.8 |
| networking | 77 | 57.5% | ±8.4 |
| GCP / Google Cloud | 58 | 43.3% | ±8.4 |
| Linux | 52 | 38.8% | ±8.3 |
| Azure | 41 | 30.6% | ±7.8 |
| Docker / containers | 38 | 28.4% | ±7.6 |
| serverless | 8 | 6% | ±4 |
| Term | Postings | Share | ±95% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Terraform | 84 | 62.7% | ±8.2 |
| infrastructure as code | 70 | 52.2% | ±8.5 |
| CI/CD | 67 | 50% | ±8.5 |
| ArgoCD | 33 | 24.6% | ±7.3 |
| GitHub Actions | 26 | 19.4% | ±6.7 |
| Ansible | 24 | 17.9% | ±6.5 |
| Helm | 19 | 14.2% | ±5.9 |
| GitLab | 14 | 10.4% | ±5.2 |
| Chef | 5 | 3.7% | ±3.2 |
| Jenkins | 4 | 3% | ±2.9 |
| Puppet | 1 | 0.7% | ±1.4 |
| Term | Postings | Share | ±95% |
|---|---|---|---|
| observability | 85 | 63.4% | ±8.2 |
| monitoring | 74 | 55.2% | ±8.4 |
| Grafana | 37 | 27.6% | ±7.6 |
| logging | 33 | 24.6% | ±7.3 |
| Prometheus | 30 | 22.4% | ±7.1 |
| distributed tracing | 27 | 20.1% | ±6.8 |
| Datadog | 24 | 17.9% | ±6.5 |
| PagerDuty | 10 | 7.5% | ±4.5 |
| Term | Postings | Share | ±95% |
|---|---|---|---|
| automation | 109 | 81.3% | ±6.6 |
| scalability | 97 | 72.4% | ±7.6 |
| incident response | 68 | 50.7% | ±8.5 |
| on-call | 57 | 42.5% | ±8.4 |
| SLO / SLA | 47 | 35.1% | ±8.1 |
| toil reduction | 36 | 26.9% | ±7.5 |
| postmortems | 17 | 12.7% | ±5.6 |
| cost optimization | 15 | 11.2% | ±5.3 |
| capacity planning | 13 | 9.7% | ±5 |
| chaos engineering | 9 | 6.7% | ±4.2 |
| disaster recovery | 4 | 3% | ±2.9 |
| Term | Postings | Share | ±95% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Python | 95 | 70.9% | ±7.7 |
| Go | 63 | 47% | ±8.5 |
| Bash / shell | 28 | 20.9% | ±6.9 |
| Rust | 7 | 5.2% | ±3.8 |
Which postings counted. Title match on DevOps, SRE, site reliability, platform engineer or infrastructure engineer. Managers, directors, technical program managers and SkillBridge interns are excluded, twelve postings, because a posting for someone who runs the team asks for different things than a posting for someone on it.
One term needed care. A bare match on “Go” also catches “go to market” and “go above and beyond”, which overstated it by about four and a half points. It is matched case-sensitively with a negative lookahead, the same handling the software engineering study uses. Every other term was checked loose against strict and came back identical, including Helm, which carries no “at the helm” contamination in this corpus.
What this cannot tell you. 41 companies, one ATS vendor, mostly US and mostly venture-funded. Not a random sample of infrastructure jobs. Terms outside the 42-term list were not counted, so nothing here is evidence that a missing term does not matter. No certification was measured at all. And it is one day's snapshot of open roles, 2026-09-09, not a trend line.
adyen · affirm · anaplan · anthropic · applovin · asana · braze · carta · chime · cloudflare · coinbase · cultureamp · databricks · discord · duolingo · elastic · faire · fivetran · flexport · gemini · gitlab · gympass · impact · intercom · mongodb · okta · oscar · pagerduty · pinterest · postman · pushpay · reddit · ridgeline · ripple · smartsheet · stripe · twilio · vercel · webflow · zocdoc · zscaler
A percentage is the share of the 134 postings in this sample that name the term at least once. It is not the share of all employers that ask for it, a cutoff an applicant tracking system applies, or a measure of your chances of an interview.
The 95% interval shows sampling error only. It does not correct for which companies publish on the job boards it draws from or for the one-day snapshot. A larger sample for one role says nothing about which role is more in demand or more important.
The table as it stands: 134 postings from 41 companies, 42 terms, method v1.0.
No figure on this page has been corrected. Every withdrawn row and corrected figure across the studies is listed in the corrections log. The analysis script that built this table and the collector it reads from are published as plain text.
Quote any figure on this page. If you do, link back to it so readers can see the sample and its limits rather than the number alone.
General citation
ZoeVera, “What 134 DevOps and SRE Job Postings Actually Ask For” (method v1.0, data collected 2026-09-09). https://www.zoevera.com/resume/devops-sre-job-description-keywords
APA style
ZoeVera. (2026-09-10). What 134 DevOps and SRE Job Postings Actually Ask For. https://www.zoevera.com/resume/devops-sre-job-description-keywords
MLA style
ZoeVera. “What 134 DevOps and SRE Job Postings Actually Ask For.” ZoeVera, 2026-09-10, www.zoevera.com/resume/devops-sre-job-description-keywords.
Chicago style
ZoeVera. “What 134 DevOps and SRE Job Postings Actually Ask For.” ZoeVera, 2026-09-10. https://www.zoevera.com/resume/devops-sre-job-description-keywords.
Before you apply
One posting weights these 42 terms differently from all 134. Paste yours against it and see which of its words your resume never uses.
Check My ResumeOr read the software engineering corpus · the security equivalent
The rest of the research
The study hub holds the method, every role's figures, the limits of each sample, and the full dataset as a CSV.