Owned a deployment pipeline
The roles Keelfolk staffs
- Platform Engineer
This is the person responsible for the systems everyone else uses every day: pipelines, environment templates, internal dashboards. We work with engineers who have already done this and have been woken up in the middle of the night when everything went down.
- Site Reliability Engineer
Duty rosters, error budgets and the service objectives set by the client. In the interview candidates get asked about an incident they handled themselves.
- Cloud, Kubernetes, Terraform
Requests for these roles come in less often. A client's stack has to sit deep in a specific tool before Keelfolk takes the role on, and the pool for that stays narrow.
WHAT A CV NEEDS TO SHOW
A CV needs to show a pipeline someone owned. It needs a call made mid-incident. A change that came out of a postmortem counts too. Keelfolk checks for that before an engineer picks up the phone.
Cloud, Kubernetes, Terraform
Cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes or Terraform work stay on a smaller bench than Platform or SRE. A client running Terraform across a multi-account AWS setup needs someone who has done exactly that. Keelfolk matches against the named tool. A generalist DevOps title doesn't decide the search here, and the search itself tends to run two to three weeks longer than a Platform Engineer hire.
2–3
Extra weeks for niche stacks
AWS
Most requested cloud
IaC
Reviewed in the interview
AWSGCPKubernetesTerraformArgoPrometheusAWSGCPKubernetesTerraformArgoPrometheusAWSGCPKubernetesTerraformArgoPrometheusAWSGCPKubernetesTerraformArgoPrometheus
What about Front end or QA roles?
Keelfolk doesn't staff these. Two clients asked for a front end hire this year, both already working with Keelfolk on a Platform or SRE role, and both got turned down for that specific request. The reason is simple: the people running technical interviews at Keelfolk know how to judge infrastructure work, not front end or QA work, so taking the role on would mean vetting a candidate nobody in the company can properly evaluate. Keelfolk points the client toward an agency it has worked with directly instead.
Working a Platform, SRE, Cloud or Terraform role already?
Leave an email and Keelfolk checks it against the next brief that matches the stack.
Include the seniority range and where a work permit already exists in the note that follows — that's what decides which briefs come through first.
