People leadership (coaching, hiring, performance management, creating a healthy team culture)
Stakeholder management and clear communication (aligning priorities across product, security, and engineering)
Prioritization and roadmap planning (balancing reliability, features, and tech debt)
Cloud platforms fundamentals (AWS/Azure/GCP, networking, compute, storage, IAM basics)
Reliability engineering practices (monitoring, alerting, incident response, post-incident reviews)
CI/CD and release engineering (build pipelines, deployment strategies, environment management)
Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform/CloudFormation) and configuration management concepts
Security-by-default mindset (least-privilege access, secrets management, patching, audit readiness)
Cost management in cloud (forecasting, usage visibility, right-sizing, unit economics awareness)
Systems thinking and architecture judgment (resiliency, scalability, failure modes)