Keeps the run stable: monitoring, procedures, on-call and continuous improvement.

Entry

Intermediate

Coding

Medium

Key skills

MonitoringRunbooksIncident managementLinux

Career overview

The Run Engineer owns the steady-state of production: dashboards, runbooks, on-call rotations and the slow, deliberate work of removing recurring toil. It is the operations twin of the SRE on less software-heavy platforms.

Main responsibilities

  • Ensure the run of production platforms and procedures
  • Monitor platform health, alerts and dashboards
  • Lead incident resolution and post-mortem analysis
  • Write and improve operational runbooks
  • Automate recurring tasks with scripts
  • Take part in on-call rotations
  • Prepare and execute change requests in production
  • Monitor scheduled jobs and batch chains
  • Keep technical documentation up to date
  • Mentor junior team members and review their work

Technical skills

Monitoring80%
Linux70%
Scripting65%
Incident management75%
Runbooks80%
Automation (Ansible)60%
Batch65%
ITIL65%

Technologies

LinuxPythonBashAnsibleGrafanaPrometheusZabbixControl-MDockerGitSplunkServiceNowNagiosKibanaJenkinsSQL

Education level

Education requirements vary depending on the company, country and experience. Professional experience, certifications and technical skills can sometimes compensate for formal education.

High School / Bac

Less common

Bac+2 (2-year degree)

Less common

Bac+3 (Bachelor)

Common entry point

Bac+5 (Master / Engineering)

Common entry point

Experience & coding level

Experience level

Entry LevelJuniorIntermediateSeniorExpert

Coding level

No codingLowMediumHighVery High
Technical difficulty64%

Useful certifications

Certifications are never mandatory. They are one way among others to prove a skill.

  • LPIC-1
  • ITIL 4 Foundation
  • CKA

Where can this career take you?

Multiple paths are possible. Click a role to open its profile.

Where can you go next?

Realistic next career moves, with compatibility and a transition roadmap for each.

Overlap: 62% · Difficulty: Medium

Skills to learn: CI/CD basics, SQL, Networking

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Overlap: 17% · Difficulty: Hard

Skills to learn: CI/CD pipelines, Docker, Kubernetes

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Overlap: 55% · Difficulty: Medium

Skills to learn: SLA & KPI, Team leadership, Shift planning

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Where can you go from here?

A typical progression built from real career relationships. Click any role to open its profile.

Soft skills
  • Staying calm under pressure
  • Rigour and attention to detail
  • Sense of ownership
  • Problem solving
  • Prioritisation
  • Documentation writing

Related resources

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