Hi everyone, I’m a final-year engineering student (India), but I’ve invested my entire final year into building a serious DevOps skill set instead of the typical DSA/Java path my peers follow.

I’m aiming for a junior Platform/DevOps/SRE role and later remote US/EU work. I would appreciate advice from people already working in DevOps/SRE.

My current skill set:

Certifications:

AWS CCP

AWS Solutions Architect Associate

Terraform Associate

CKA (in progress, CKAD next)

Practical experience (projects):

Terraform modules: VPC, EKS cluster, node groups, ALB, EC2, IAM roles

Kubernetes on EKS: Deployments, Services, Ingress, HPA

CI/CD pipelines: GitHub Actions + ArgoCD (GitOps)

Cloud Resume Challenge

Logging/monitoring basics: kubelet logs, metrics-server, events

Networking fundamentals: CNI, DNS, NetworkPolicy (practice lab)

I’ll complete 2 full DevOps projects (EKS deployment + IaC project) in the next couple months.

✅ What I want guidance on:

1. Is this stack competitive for junior DevOps roles today?

Given the current job market slowdown, is AWS + Terraform + Kubernetes (CKA/CKAD) enough to stand out?

2. Should I focus on deeper skills like:

observability (Prometheus/Grafana)

Python automation

Helm/Kustomize

more GitOps tooling

open source contributions Which of these actually matter early on?

3. For remote US/EU roles:

Do companies hire junior DevOps remotely?

Or should I first get 1 year of Indian experience and then apply abroad?

Are contract roles (US-based) more realistic than full-time?

4. What would you prioritize if you were in my position at 21?

More projects? Open source? More certs? Interview prep? Networking?

5. Any underrated skill gaps I should fix early?

Security? Troubleshooting? Linux fundamentals?

I’m not looking for motivational hype — I want practical, experience-based direction from people who have been in the field.

Thanks to anyone who replies.