Natalie Godec

What I'm seeing more of in the Tech market.. Im seeing more and more engineering teams hiring software engineers with fullstack capability and hands-on experience with provisioning tools like Terraform 👀🛠️ It's no longer just about front-end polish or backend architecture, it's about engineers who can build features and stand up the infrastructure to support them 📈 Fullstack isn’t just JavaScript and Python or Java anymore - it’s CI/CD, cloud, infra-as-code with knowledge of AI/LLM's and a bit of security thrown in too😂 So it begs the question… 🤔 Is the specialised frontend or backend-only engineer becoming less common - or just less in demand? In a world where teams are leaner, and time-to-value matters more than ever, multi-skilled engineers are fast becoming the backbone of modern teams 🥸 But what are they called?.. I guess 'DevOps first, Full-stack AI security engineer' should be accurate! 😅 Curious to hear from engineering leaders.. Have you changed how you hire or build your teams recently? #techrecruitment #freelancejobs #amsterdamjob

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In my experience, what separates a good DevOps engineer from a great one rarely shows up on a CV.   Most job specs just list tools: ✅ Terraform ✅ Docker ✅ Kubernetes ✅ CI/CD pipelines ✅ Cloud (AWS, GCP, etc.)   But that’s not what separates good from great.   Here’s what hiring managers should be looking for:   🔍 Systems thinking – Do they understand the bigger picture? Can they design infra that scales and doesn’t fall apart under pressure?   🔁 Automation mindset – Are they allergic to manual steps? Great DevOps engineers automate themselves out of a job (in the best way).   💬 Cross-team empathy – DevOps is a team sport. Can they translate infra jargon to product teams and vice versa?   Most job specs miss this. Most interviews don’t test for this.   If you’re hiring DevOps engineers and want to attract the ones who actually move the needle, I’d be happy to share what’s worked for my clients.   Just drop me a message. 💬

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Wondering how to get your job application noticed in the crowded UK dev market? I've been chatting with a lot of software developers recently, some early in their careers, others with years of experience, and one thing keeps coming up: "How do I actually stand out?" The truth is, the UK dev job market is tough right now. But I’ve seen what works (and what doesn’t), and I wanted to share a few tips that have helped candidates land interviews, and offers. Here’s what I’d recommend if you’re applying right now: 1. Customise, customise, customise - I can’t stress this enough: tailor your CV and cover letter for every role. Show how your experience matches their needs. Make it super easy for someone to see why you're a great fit at a glance. 2. Build (and show) cool stuff - Your GitHub or personal site can speak louder than your CV. Share real projects, ideally something beyond a to-do list app. If you've used a company’s API or built something relevant to them? Shout about it! 3. Let your passion show - Make it clear what kind of work excites you, whether that’s fintech, AI, or clean architecture. Add a bit of personality to your LinkedIn or portfolio. It helps you connect with the right teams. 5. Network is your net-worth - Go to meet-ups, tech events, comment on posts, send friendly DMs. A lot of roles never get posted online. The more people who know what you’re looking for, the more chances you’ll get. 6. Stay sharp with in-demand skills - Keep an eye on what’s hot in the UK, Java, JavaScript, C#, and cloud stuff are still in demand. Even just having a recent course or project to show you’re staying current can help. 7. Don’t get discouraged - You’ll hear nothing back from some roles. That’s normal. If a job feels right but you haven’t heard back in a couple of weeks, follow up! It shows you're proactive, not pushy. 8. Make your online presence count - Your LinkedIn and GitHub should clearly show what you're about, your skills, interests, and what you’re aiming for. This is often the first thing someone sees before they even open your CV. - Final thought: If you’re applying right now, especially as a junior, just know it’s normal to feel stuck sometimes. The first job is often the hardest to get, but once you're in, everything gets easier. Keep going, keep building, keep learning. And if we’re connected, don’t hesitate to reach out. Always happy to offer a bit of advice or point you in the right direction. #SoftwareEngineering #TechCareers #UKJobs #DevCommunity #JobSearchTips #CareerAdvice #RecruiterLife #SoftwareDeveloper #HiringTechTalent

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Interviewed 4 engineers last week for a client. All four had “led” the same migration. Same company. Same project. Same quarter. Four people on a 12-person team all claiming ownership of the Kubernetes migration in their CV summary. Word for word, almost identical framing. This is what happens when interview prep becomes performance instead of conversation. Candidates optimise for the right keywords. Hiring managers optimise for pattern recognition. And both sides end up in a role that looked perfect on paper and falls apart by month three. The best engineering hires I place aren’t polished. They’re specific. They tell you the bit that went wrong, the trade-off they argued against, the decision they’d reverse. If every candidate sounds the same, your process is selecting for presentation, not capability. #hiring #engineering #leadership #tech #recruitment

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⚡DevOps, SRE & Platform Engineering... Where are we really at?⚡ Here’s what I’m seeing & some stats that jumped out: - The UK DevOps market is set to grow 11.5% every year until 2035 - Median SRE salary sits at around £80K (London a touch higher) - Contractors still do well at ~£500/day, but those rates are starting to feel the squeeze - And demand? Over 5,000 live SRE roles in the UK right now. Not small numbers. - Platform engineering is on a rocketship too, forecast to hit $24B globally by 2030. The challenges are familiar: teams racing to ship faster while trying not to set fire to reliability. “Toil” (all the repetitive manual stuff) is actually creeping back up, even with more AI tools around. And SREs/DevOps engs are being pulled in every direction, observability, security, cost, incident response… the list keeps growing. But here’s the flip side: - Platform engineering is giving DevOps a facelift, golden paths, self-service, less chaos. - SRE has become strategic. Reliability isn’t just nice to have; it impacts brand and revenue directly. - The unicorns are the people who can sit across infra, automation, developer experience, and business context. My take?... DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering aren’t separate worlds anymore. They’re overlapping fast. The companies (and engineers) who can balance speed & stability while building platforms that scale responsibly will come out on top. What do you reckon? Is platform engineering really the next stage after DevOps, or just the same thing with new branding?

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“​Using a specialist SRE recruiter is too expensive”​ That same hiring manager 6 months later: “​We still haven’t filled the role. We’ve sifted through countless mismatched CVs, and the generic agencies we tried didn’t grasp the nuances of SRE. Eventually, we settled, and now the hire has left after just 3 months.”​ So let’s break down the numbers, and feel free to fight me on the math: Building a high-performance culture? A decent Senior SRE expects to be paid at least $180k a year in base salary alone. Cost of a bad hire: Estimates range from 30% to 150% of the annual salary, factoring in recruitment, onboarding, lost productivity, and re-hiring expenses ​ Scenario: A mis-hire leaves after 3 months. Direct salary cost: $50,170 Estimated additional costs (conservatively at 50% of annual salary): $25,087 Total cost: $75,257 And that’s just for one mis-hire. And you haven't actually bought anything. $75k gone like the wind. But wait. There's more. Now consider the other costs: Leadership time: Hours spent in interviews, onboarding, and performance management. Team morale: Existing team members covering gaps, leading to burnout & reduced productivity. Your reputation: Every time you make a bad hiring decision, your team loses respect for you. Project delays: Missed deadlines impacting business objectives.​ The kicker is all of this has taken 6 months to draw out. And I'll say it again, you've just lost $75k with nothing to show for it. And now you're right back to where you started, except this time you have to explain why the last hire didn't work out. Investing in someone like me isn’t just about filling a role. It’s about safeguarding your time. Your Team’s productivity. Morale. Your company’s bottom line and your reputation. So call me. I won't be offended if you think I'm too expensive.

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So what makes a good Solutions Architect? Most job specs list tools. Terraform. Kubernetes. A bit of cloud. Some buzzword soup. The best architects I speak to don’t lead with tools — they lead with clarity, they bring out the best in others. They simplify complexity. They guide delivery without ego. They know where to challenge and where to compromise. Good architecture still comes down to judgment. That’s who I headhunt. And work with :)

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🚨 I see brilliant contractors fail interviews every week. Not because they’re not good enough …but because they forget to show what they know. 💡 These are seriously talented people who can spin up an environment, debug a mess of legacy code, and deliver clean, scalable solutions. But when it comes to interviews? They undersell themselves. Here’s the problem 👇 Clients don’t see your skill they only hear what you can explain. If you can’t walk them through your thinking, they can’t picture you doing the job. That’s why I always tell my contractors to use the P.E.E. method: 👉 Point  Evidence  Explain When asked a question: Point: Make your main point clearly. Evidence: Back it up with a real example from a project. Explain: Tie it back to how it fits their role or tech environment. 🧠 Example: “I’d approach that with a microservices pattern. In my last project, we split a monolith into 6 services using Node and Docker that reduced deploy times by 40%, which sounds similar to what you’re describing.” That’s not just answering that’s selling your value. ✨ Bonus prep tips for contractors: Ask your recruiter if they have insight from others who’ve interviewed it’s often gold. Check if there’s a tech test and prep accordingly. Review the tech stack brush up on fundamentals and common interview questions. Practice talking through your examples out loud great devs often think clearly but explain vaguely 🎯 Bottom line: Intelligence isn’t enough in an interview communication is what sells it. You already know your stuff. Your goal is to make sure the client knows it too.

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I came across something recently that I don’t think enough people actually use in their Terraform workflow. or I'm just late to the party and you already do 😅 We all know Terraform builds a dependency graph behind the scenes.  But how often do we actually look at it? While researching, I found that Terraform exposes this with a single built-in command: terraform graph By itself, the output isn’t very readable, but it contains the entire structure of how Terraform sees your resources. Then I discovered tools like Blast Radius that take that raw graph and turn it into a visual map of your infrastructure.   It shows how resources connect, which ones rely on others, and how updates move through the stack.   To give an idea, here’s an example graph (not from my own configuration) that shows what Terraform is really structuring in the background. Seeing the graph makes the behaviour during plan and apply make far more sense. It becomes obvious why something updates first, why something waits, and why certain resources recreate instead of patching in place. If you haven’t tried visualising your Terraform graph, it’s worth doing once (many other visualisation tools out there)   It’s one of those things that instantly deepens your understanding of how Terraform thinks. Anyone else using visualisers like this in their workflow?   #DevOpsJourney #CloudEngineering #TerraformLearning #InfrastructureAsCode #BuildInPublic #LearningInPublic #TechMindset #EngineeringGrowth   

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Over the past few years, I’ve seen a steady rise in demand for backend developers with Node.js experience. The reasons are clear: It scales effectively for high-traffic applications Teams benefit from using JavaScript across frontend and backend The ecosystem is vast, enabling faster development It’s a natural fit for real-time apps like chat, streaming, and collaboration tools For developers, this creates opportunities to work on innovative projects. For businesses, it provides the flexibility and scalability needed to stay competitive. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts: is Node.js becoming the standard for backend development, or just one strong option among many?

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⚡️ How Monta scales EV charging infrastructure with confidence on AWS Monta, a global SaaS provider powering over 250,000 EV charging points, partnered with DoiT to enhance FinOps and cost governance across its Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. With DoiT Cloud Intelligence™, Flexsave, and DataHub, Monta connects engineering and finance around shared KPIs, extends visibility beyond cloud-native spend, and plans infrastructure growth with confidence as its EV network scales globally. ✅ Cost per active charge point tracked as a core FinOps KPI ✅ Unified visibility across AWS and third-party platform costs with DataHub ✅ Improved forecasting accuracy aligned to business growth ✅ Faster adoption of AWS capabilities through expert FinOps guidance See how Monta builds and scales responsibly on AWS with DoiT Read the story here: https://lnkd.in/g5J3QtjK #FinOps #CloudGovernance #AWS

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I have an exciting announcement to make - we've just open sourced Terraform Provider for OpenAI. It covers most, if not all, resources that can be managed via an API - you can now provision your projects and service accounts as code, manage user access as code and do some fun GenAI automations as code. Check out the full announcement - including a demo of generating new Internet-available AWS Lambda Functions, with the code generated via the OAI provider and then passed to the Lambda deployment :) #terraform #openai #automation #infrastructureascode https://lnkd.in/dKgcFhXK

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Java’s not going anywhere. But the roles are changing. Over the past few months in Oslo, I’ve noticed a shift in the kind of Java roles coming up — and the kind of engineers companies are actually saying “yes” to. Here’s what’s stood out lately: • Less legacy, more product-focused — Modern Java stacks, often with Spring Boot, Kafka, Docker/Kubernetes in the mix • Hiring managers are looking for depth, not just years — practical experience with APIs, integration, and distributed systems matters more than “10+ years on CV” • Cloud-native is becoming the norm — Java + AWS/Azure is a very common combo in active roles • A lot of companies still want Java engineers who can talk to product teams, not just write clean code If you're working in Java and thinking about a move, or hiring and wondering what the market looks like — happy to share what I’m seeing. Oslo might be quiet in July, but good conversations are still happening behind the scenes. #Java #SoftwareEngineering #OsloTech #BackendDev #TechRecruitment #SpringBoot #Kafka #AWS #NorwayJobs

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