DevOps Engineer cover letter example

DevOps Engineer cover letter example: opening on slow deploys the team already has, proof from an EKS migration and a 40% cost cut, a calm close.

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Fraser McLeod

Senior Platform and DevOps Engineer | AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD

Edinburgh

30 October 2026

Morag GrantHead of EngineeringPentland Health TechEdinburgh

Re: Lead Platform Engineer

Dear Ms Grant,

Your Lead Platform Engineer advert at Pentland Health Tech says your engineers wait days for infrastructure and deploy once a week. Four years ago that described Forthlight Energy too, and changing it is the work I am proudest of.

I led our move of 45 services from hand-built EC2 instances to Amazon EKS, and at the same time built a library of 30 Terraform modules that eight product teams now use to provision what they need without raising a ticket. Deployments went from weekly to more than 20 a day. Once the platform was consistent, cost work became much easier: Graviton instances, spot node pools and savings plans reduced our AWS bill by 40%, around £380,000 a year.

I also believe reliability is a team habit rather than a tool. Moving to SLO-based alerts and blameless post-incident reviews brought our mean time to recovery down from two hours to 25 minutes, and on-call became something people no longer dreaded.

Before Forthlight I replaced Jenkins with GitHub Actions for 60 repositories at Leith Software, cutting average build time from 18 minutes to 7, and I started my career looking after 300 servers in two data centres. That mix means I can talk to developers about pipelines and to finance about the bill in the same week.

I bring 10 years across systems administration, DevOps and platform engineering, I currently lead a team of four, and I hold the CKA and AWS Solutions Architect Professional certifications. I would welcome a conversation about your platform plans.

Kind regards,

Fraser McLeod

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How this letter works

What each part of the letter above does, and how to do the same in yours.

The opening

It quotes the pain from the advert, days waiting for infrastructure and weekly deploys, and says Fraser's last employer had the same pain. Platform leaders hire people who have fixed their exact situation before.

Whom to address

Address the head of engineering or the platform lead named in the advert. In UK and Irish tech, "Dear Ms Grant" and "Kind regards" are the normal register; first names only if the advert itself uses them.

Requirements matched to proof

The posting asks forSelf-service infrastructure
The letter shows30 Terraform modules used by eight teams without tickets; 20+ deploys a day.
The posting asks forControl cloud costs
The letter showsAWS bill down 40%, about £380,000 a year.
The posting asks forImprove reliability
The letter showsSLO alerting and blameless reviews; recovery time from two hours to 25 minutes.

Length

Five paragraphs, within the usual 250 to 400 words. Each paragraph pairs one change with one number, which is how engineering leaders read a platform story.

This letter: 253 words.

The closing

It asks for a conversation about the employer's platform plans, keeping the focus on their roadmap. That is the conversation a lead hire is really about.

Mistakes to avoid in this letter

  1. A wall of tool names

    Kubernetes, Terraform and Argo CD are on the CV. The letter should explain what changed for developers because of them.

  2. No cost or reliability numbers

    Platform work is judged on deploy frequency, recovery time and spend. Give one of each if you can.

  3. Ignoring the people side

    Platform teams succeed when product teams adopt their work. Say how you got engineers to use what you built.

Questions about this cover letter

Should a DevOps cover letter mention on-call experience?
Yes, briefly: how incidents were handled and what you changed afterwards. It tells a hiring manager you understand the operational side, not just building.
How do I write the letter when moving from sysadmin to DevOps?
Lead with automation you did as a sysadmin, such as Ansible builds or scripted deployments, and the time it saved. That is the bridge hiring managers look for.
Is it worth naming the cloud provider in the letter?
Yes, when it matches the posting. If it does not, describe the concepts you used and say you can transfer them; most platform skills carry across clouds.

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