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If you're building a team, it's not likely that you'll have all extremely experienced engineers It would be best to build a matrix of skills, knowledge, and competency across seniority bands That way, you can set clear expectations to your team and to your leadership This would allow you to be more fluent with each category. Here are some thoughts/ideas • Instead of "Terraform", you could bucket as "IaC". For juniors, I would expect a minimum bar of having used IaC before. For senior roles, I would expect a strong competency in Terraform or Helm (whichever tech you currently use or plan to use) • If you're committed to k8s, you could have varying degrees of k8s experience for each band. (i.e. junior: have deployed an app using k8s, senior: have built and managed k8s clusters) • In addition to k8s, I would add a category for cloud infrastructure (If you're only using AWS, be specific to AWS) Since you're hiring for platform engineers, I would also expect varying levels of building products • Communication with customers and stakeholders when things go bump in the night • Ability/Desire to firefight when the platform is down • Competency building resilient products (testing, good practices) When it comes to philosophy, I would be more lenient on knowledge of devops and team topologies but focus more on desire to adopt new practices. (Candidly, it's your job to understand those practices and apply them 🙂 ) It's usually so difficult to find such a wide cross-section of skills you may filter out too many skilled engineers.

only saw this message now @Bradley Sickles . that is definitely some food for thought. really appreciate the input 🙂

This is not platform specific, but an interesting roadmap for learning progression and planning can be found here: https://roadmap.sh/devops