Top 12 Platform Engineer Skills to Put on Your Resume
In today's noisy tech market, your resume has to do more than list tools. It needs to show how you build resilient platforms, automate the grind, and keep systems humming when traffic spikes and the pager sings. Blend hard skills with judgment, tie outcomes to impact, and you’ll open doors that weren’t there yesterday.
Platform Engineer Skills
1. Kubernetes
Kubernetes orchestrates containerized applications, automating deployment, scaling, and operations across clusters. It gives platform engineers a consistent control plane for complex, shifting workloads.
Why It's Important
Kubernetes standardizes runtimes and policies across environments, making large-scale operations predictable. You get autoscaling, rolling updates, service discovery, and guardrails that turn chaos into a system.
How to Improve Kubernetes Skills
Level up by tightening the bolts and smoothing the path for teams:
Performance: Right-size requests/limits, enable Horizontal Pod Autoscaler and consider Vertical Pod Autoscaler for tricky workloads. Use Cluster Autoscaler to match capacity to demand.
Security: Enforce RBAC least-privilege, apply NetworkPolicies, and adopt Pod Security Standards. Scan images, sign them, and verify at admission. Limit host-level privileges and cap container capabilities.
Observability: Ship metrics with Prometheus, visualize with Grafana, centralize logs via Fluentd or similar, trace with OpenTelemetry. Watch SLOs, not just dashboards.
Cluster Management: Manage clusters with infrastructure as code and GitOps. Keep manifests versioned, reviewable, and reconciled automatically.
Operations: Use readiness/liveness/startup probes smartly, budget for disruption, and plan node pool upgrades with surge settings. Test failure modes, not just happy paths.
How to Display Kubernetes Skills on Your Resume
2. Docker
Docker packages applications and dependencies into portable containers. Same image, same behavior, from laptop to prod.
Why It's Important
Containerization shortens feedback loops and removes “works on my machine.” It simplifies CI/CD, enables reproducible builds, and keeps environments clean.
How to Improve Docker Skills
Slim Images: Multi-stage builds, minimal bases, and careful layering. Cut attack surface, speed pulls.
Security: Scan images, generate SBOMs, sign and verify artifacts. Drop root, pin versions, and keep secrets out of images.
Storage & Networking: Prefer overlay2, design networks for isolation, and keep volumes tidy. Be deliberate about exposed ports.
Resource Controls: Set CPU and memory limits. Prevent noisy neighbors from trampling everything else.
Logging & Metrics: Use a consistent logging driver and ship to centralized stores. Export container metrics to your monitoring stack.
Automation: Bake image builds into CI. Tag predictably, promote immutably, and prune aggressively.
Orchestration Readiness: Design images to be stateless, configurable via env and files, and crash-only. Easy to scale, easy to replace.
How to Display Docker Skills on Your Resume
3. Terraform
Terraform describes infrastructure with code. You declare the desired state; it plans, tracks, and applies changes across clouds and providers.
Why It's Important
Repeatable infra beats snowflakes. Versioned definitions reduce manual drift and unlock safe, fast, peer-reviewed changes.
How to Improve Terraform Skills
Modular Design: Encapsulate patterns into modules with clear inputs/outputs and sane defaults. Cut repetition, boost consistency.
State Strategy: Use remote state with locking and encryption. Partition state by lifecycle boundaries to reduce blast radius.
Quality Gates: Lint, format, validate, and policy-check (OPA/Sentinel-style) in CI. Plans must be visible and auditable.
Secrets: Keep credentials out of state; lean on dedicated secret stores and dynamic credentials.
Workspaces & Environments: One codebase, multiple environments. Tag everything; standardize naming.
Drift & Lifecycle: Detect drift, review before apply, and design destroy-safe resources with appropriate lifecycle rules.
Ecosystem Awareness: Know provider nuances and upgrade paths. Be mindful of the licensing split; many teams also adopt OpenTofu.
How to Display Terraform Skills on Your Resume
4. AWS
AWS offers compute, storage, networking, databases, and a galaxy of managed services. It scales from a tiny lab to a global footprint without changing the map.
Why It's Important
You get speed, breadth, and managed building blocks. Platform teams can ship faster, automate deeper, and harden security without reinventing the basics.
How to Improve AWS Skills
Security First: Least-privilege IAM, short-lived credentials, and MFA. Centralize guardrails with organization-wide policies and logging.
Cost Controls: Use Savings Plans and right-size instances. Consider Graviton for better price/perf. Tag aggressively and set budgets with alerts.
Reliability: Spread across AZs, design for failure, and practice game days. Back up, test restores, and version buckets.
Observability: Stream logs, collect metrics and traces, and wire alerts to SLOs. Make debugging boring and fast.
Automation: Codify everything with IaC. Event-driven glue (serverless where it fits) keeps systems nimble and cheap.
How to Display AWS Skills on Your Resume
5. Ansible
Ansible automates configuration, orchestration, and app deployment through human-readable playbooks. Agentless, predictable, and easy to adopt.
Why It's Important
It reduces toil and makes change safe. Repeatable configurations eliminate drift, and roles encapsulate best practices you can share.
How to Improve Ansible Skills
Structure: Use roles and collections. Keep inventories clear, variables scoped, and defaults sensible.
Dynamic Inventory: Generate inventories from your cloud or CMDB to follow reality, not wishful thinking.
Secrets: Protect sensitive values with Vault and isolate credentials. No secrets in repos, ever.
Testing: Validate roles with Molecule and lint regularly. Quick feedback beats late surprises.
Performance: Limit facts where possible, enable pipelining, and parallelize safely. Idempotence or bust.
Documentation: Describe vars, expectations, and examples in role README files. Future you will thank present you.
How to Display Ansible Skills on Your Resume
6. Prometheus
Prometheus scrapes metrics, stores time series, and powers alerts. Purpose-built for reliability and pull-based collection.
Why It's Important
With crisp metrics and sane alerting, you catch problems early and triage faster. It’s the backbone of pragmatic SRE practices.
How to Improve Prometheus Skills
Scrape Smart: Tune intervals and timeouts. Avoid metric explosions by curbing high-cardinality labels.
Recording Rules: Precompute expensive queries and SLOs. Speed matters when incidents unfold.
High Availability: Run redundant Prometheus pairs. Use Thanos or Cortex for global views and long-term retention.
Storage Hygiene: SSDs, sensible retention windows, and remote write where history matters.
Alert Discipline: Group, deduplicate, and route alerts via Alertmanager. Silence with intent, not indifference.
Self-Observability: Monitor Prometheus itself—query latency, scrape errors, WAL pressure. Dogs should eat their own kibble.
Security: Lock endpoints, encrypt traffic, and restrict who can query sensitive metrics.
How to Display Prometheus Skills on Your Resume
7. Grafana
Grafana turns metrics, logs, and traces into living dashboards and actionable alerts. One canvas, many data sources.
Why It's Important
Visualization shortens the path from symptom to cause. Teams share context quickly, codify runbooks visually, and keep systems transparent.
How to Improve Grafana Skills
Dashboards with Intent: Build for questions, not decoration. Use variables, templating, and repeat panels to make dashboards interactive.
Unified Observability: Bring metrics, logs, and traces together. Pair with Loki and Tempo (or your equivalents) for a tight feedback loop.
Provisioning: Manage datasources, folders, and dashboards as code. Version them, review them, ship them like software.
Performance & Scale: Enable query caching where appropriate and shard load across instances. Keep heavy queries off peak paths.
Security: Enforce SSO, granular permissions, and HTTPS. Regular updates aren’t optional.
Alerting: Use the unified alerting model. Tie alerts to SLOs and noise-test them before production.
How to Display Grafana Skills on Your Resume
8. Jenkins
Jenkins automates build, test, and deployment pipelines. Extensible, battle-tested, and everywhere.
Why It's Important
CI/CD turns commits into outcomes. Jenkins makes releases repeatable and auditable, even when stacks get complicated.
How to Improve Jenkins Skills
Pipeline as Code: Use declarative Jenkinsfiles and shared libraries. Review changes like any other code.
Scale Out: Add agents, keep masters lean, and run ephemeral build nodes on Kubernetes for isolation and elasticity.
Security: Keep core and plugins current. Enforce role-based access, credential binding, and minimal plugin footprints.
Observability: Export metrics, centralize logs, and monitor queue times and executor saturation.
Resilience: Back up configs and job definitions. Practice restore drills; verify not just that backups exist, but that they work.
Governance: Standardize stages, naming, and promotion flows. Less bespoke, more predictable.
How to Display Jenkins Skills on Your Resume
9. Python
Python is the glue of platform work—scripting, services, tooling, and automation with a clean, readable syntax.
Why It's Important
From CLIs to operators to infrastructure tooling, Python’s libraries and ecosystem make automation fast and maintainable.
How to Improve Python Skills
Foundations: Data structures, OOP, typing, packaging. Know the language, not just the library du jour.
Automation: Build robust CLIs and scripts, handle errors gracefully, and structure code for reuse.
Web & APIs: Spin up lightweight services for internal platforms. Clean contracts, clear schemas, solid auth.
Testing: Embrace pytest, fixtures, and coverage. CI should run fast and fail loud.
Performance: Profile hotspots, consider async for IO-bound work, and offload CPU-heavy tasks where it makes sense.
Packaging & Repro: Lock deps, build wheels, and publish to internal indexes. Reproducibility wins.
How to Display Python Skills on Your Resume
10. Git
Git tracks changes, branches experiments, and stitches work from many hands into one codebase.
Why It's Important
Version control underpins everything: infra, app code, policies, and docs. It enables reviews, rollbacks, and reliability.
How to Improve Git Skills
Advanced Moves: Rebase with care, bisect to hunt regressions, cherry-pick when surgical fixes are needed, and use worktrees to juggle contexts.
Hooks & Automation: Pre-commit checks, commit message linting, and secret scans. Guard the gates automatically.
Branching Strategy: Trunk-based or a lean flow—pick one, document it, and stick to it.
Security: Sign commits, protect branches, require reviews, and prune stale access. Hygiene matters.
Large Assets: Use dedicated storage strategies for big binaries to keep repos snappy.
How to Display Git Skills on Your Resume
11. Linux
Linux is the backbone of modern platforms. Stable, flexible, scriptable—built for servers, networks, and containers.
Why It's Important
Control and clarity. You get predictable performance, granular security, and the tooling to tune both.
How to Improve Linux Skills
Performance: Monitor with standard tools, profile with perf and friends, and tune kernel and sysctl for your workloads.
Security: Enforce SELinux or AppArmor, lock down SSH, rotate keys, and patch regularly. Minimal packages, minimal risk.
Networking: Understand iptables/nftables, traffic control, and the kernel’s networking stack. Measure with iperf and fix from evidence.
Filesystems: Choose wisely (ext4, XFS, btrfs in the right scenarios). Align mount options with access patterns.
Automation: Codify configs with Ansible and keep golden images fresh. Fewer one-off tweaks, more repeatable states.
Containers: Know cgroups, namespaces, and the runtime layers. Logs and cgroups tell the truth about behavior.
Troubleshooting: Systemd deep dives, journal analysis, eBPF tooling (bcc, bpftrace) to see what’s actually happening.
How to Display Linux Skills on Your Resume
12. Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine. Fast indexing, powerful querying, and near–real-time insights over big data.
Why It's Important
For logs, metrics, and search-heavy features, it delivers speed and scale. Platform teams use it to investigate issues, power analytics, and surface signals from noise.
How to Improve Elasticsearch Skills
Right-Sized Hardware: SSDs, ample RAM for heap and filesystem cache, and balanced CPU. Don’t starve the cluster.
Index Strategy: Set shard/replica counts based on data and query shapes. Rotate with lifecycle policies to keep hot data fast and cold data cheap.
Query Tuning: Prefer filters for cacheability, avoid deep pagination, and profile queries to trim the fat.
Stability: Watch heap usage, GC pauses, merge pressure, and thread pools. Scale out before red lights flash.
Data Modeling: Map fields deliberately, limit high-cardinality keywords, and denormalize where it pays off.
Ecosystem Awareness: Know when OpenSearch fits your needs. Choose based on features, licensing, and operational comfort.
How to Display Elasticsearch Skills on Your Resume
