I have about one year of professional DevOps experience at a mid-sized service company in Mumbai. Since I am currently the only DevOps person on my team, I get to work independently across a fairly wide range of responsibilities. AWS is my main area, including deploying and managing client projects, troubleshooting, monitoring, and handling infrastructure work. I have also started working on MLOps, helped set up AWS and Azure landing zones, and worked closely with our CISO on ISO 27001 implementation. For the compliance effort, I am contributing to the policies, technical controls, documentation, infrastructure and security decisions, and most of the implementation groundwork, with guidance from an external consultant and the CISO. I have completed the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification, along with Azure Fundamentals and Azure AI Fundamentals from college. The concern is that my compensation is relatively low, even though I am getting exposure to many areas. I am trying to understand whether this experience represents meaningful career growth or whether I am simply handling miscellaneous work without developing enough depth. How valuable will AWS infrastructure, MLOps, landing zones, and ISO 27001 experience be for my next move? Should I stay until the ISO certification and audit are complete so I can demonstrate a finished implementation, or should I start looking for a better-paying role now? Over the next year, should I focus on AWS and SRE fundamentals, security and compliance, automation, or something else? I would especially appreciate advice from people who have navigated the first few years of a DevOps or SRE career.
5 Answers
Do not let your employer define your entire career by continually adding unrelated responsibilities. Use the next 12 months to create a portfolio of a few end-to-end achievements: an infrastructure environment rebuilt from code, a reusable landing-zone pattern, an automated deployment pipeline, and a clearly documented set of ISO controls that passed review. Those examples will be more valuable than collecting more entry-level certifications. Once you have one strong story and, ideally, the completed audit, test the market and compare roles based on mentorship, engineering standards, and scope—not just salary.
You are getting valuable exposure, but being the only person responsible for all of it makes the depth difficult to judge. ISO 27001 implementation alone can be a substantial project, and handling it alongside infrastructure, deployments, and MLOps creates a real risk that everything remains partially developed or dependent on your personal knowledge. A useful test is whether you could take an empty AWS account and build a working, secure platform within a reasonable timeframe. Try rebuilding one non-critical environment from version-controlled Terraform and configuration management, without manual console steps. Anything you still have to do by hand becomes a concrete learning and automation target.
A DevOps title should involve more than deploying applications and responding to infrastructure requests. The strongest career growth comes from building automation and internal platforms that engineering or data teams can consume: repeatable deployments, self-service environments, policy enforcement, testing, monitoring, and reliable rollback paths. Ask yourself whether your work is reducing manual effort and improving delivery quality, or whether you are mainly acting as an operations generalist. Document the before-and-after impact of anything you improve.
Breadth is not a problem this early in your career. The risk is having no area where you can explain the reasoning behind your decisions. Pick one or two specialties—AWS platform engineering and security/compliance seem like natural choices—and go deeper there. Learn networking, IAM, Terraform, CI/CD, observability, backup and disaster recovery, cost management, and incident response. Keep the MLOps and Azure work as useful secondary exposure instead of trying to become an expert in everything at once.
For someone one year in, this sounds like strong exposure and genuine progress. Landing zones, security controls, compliance documentation, and production AWS work can all be useful stories in future interviews. The important thing is to turn the work into measurable outcomes: which controls you implemented, what you automated, how access and account setup work, what reliability improvements you made, and whether the organization completes the audit. If the audit is only a few weeks or months away, staying through it could give you a much stronger accomplishment than simply listing that you participated in ISO work. After that, start interviewing rather than waiting indefinitely for compensation to catch up.
With guidance from the CISO and an ISO consultant, I am handling most of the technical groundwork, while also deploying several client projects and setting up a complete AWS landing zone. I can design and deploy infrastructure based on project requirements, security, automation, and documentation needs, but I agree that proving it through a repeatable rebuild would show the depth more clearly.