The XYZ formula
Google's hiring guidance: write bullets as "Accomplished [X], as measured by [Y], by doing [Z]." Start with a strong verb, name a concrete result with a number, and say how you did it. Every example below follows it — swap in your own metrics.
Migration & architecture
- Migrated 120 on-premise VMs to AWS with a lift-and-shift-then-optimize plan, decreasing resource waste 35% with zero downtime.
- Architected a multi-account AWS landing zone in Terraform that onboarded 40 teams under consistent IAM, tagging, and guardrails.
- Designed VPC and Transit Gateway networking for 30+ accounts, replacing brittle peering and cutting connectivity tickets 60%.
Cost optimization (FinOps)
- Reduced monthly cloud spend $42K (28%) through EC2 rightsizing, Savings Plans, and shutting down idle non-prod resources.
- Built a FinOps tagging and Cost Explorer dashboard that gave 12 teams spend visibility and cut untagged resources from 45% to 3%.
- Consolidated 3 overlapping storage tiers into lifecycle-managed S3, saving $180K annually with no access-time impact.
Automation & IaC
- Built reusable Terraform modules that cut new-environment provisioning time 73% (from 2 days to 4 hours).
- Automated 200+ daily deployments with zero-downtime releases via GitHub Actions and blue-green cutovers.
- Codified a 250-resource AWS estate in Terraform, eliminating manual console changes and cutting drift incidents 90%.
Security & reliability
- Achieved SOC 2 compliance across the estate by enforcing KMS encryption, least-privilege IAM, and GuardDuty threat detection.
- Cut mean time to detection from 45 minutes to 8 by centralizing logs and metrics in CloudWatch and Grafana.
- Maintained 99.99% availability for a customer-facing platform across 3 regions with automated failover and DR runbooks.