The starting line
I’m Umesh. I joined Deloitte USI in September 2024 as an analyst. I spent my first year in a support role that had nothing to do with what I signed up for, then moved to a DevOps project working on Feature Flag rollouts and trunk-based development. That team got rolled off. Now I’m on bench.
Bench time is the most expensive free time of my life, so I’m not wasting it.
The bet
For the next 31 weeks, I’m doing exactly one thing: building a Site Reliability Engineering portfolio strong enough to land a remote role at a company outside India.
Here’s what that looks like, concretely:
- Three production projects, deployed and observable, with public dashboards
- Three certifications: AZ-104, CKA, HashiCorp Terraform Associate
- Ten technical blog posts — this is post #1
- A revised resume and an interview pipeline by November 2026
No side quests. No LeetCode in C++. No distractions into startup hustle videos or design tutorials. Just the plan, one sprint at a time.
Why SRE
I’ll write a full post on this later, but the short version: I love system design more than coding puzzles, I already have hands-on DevOps experience, and SRE is one of the most AI-resistant engineering roles that still pays well and hires remotely from India. It’s the right bet for me.
What this blog is
This blog will be honest engineering notes — not motivational content, not “10 tips” listicles. Things I’m actually building, actually breaking, and actually fixing. If you’re on a similar path — service company, tier-3 college, feeling stuck — maybe the receipts help.
What’s next
The first real post will be about shipping a WebRTC file transfer app to production with full observability. That’s the flagship portfolio project. I’ll write as I build.
See you at post #2.
— Umesh