SRE Thailand Bootcamp

Week 20: Behavioral, Soft Skills & Final Review

Theme: Behavioral interviews, salary negotiation, resume/CV polish, final portfolio review.

Learning Objectives

1. Answer SRE behavioral questions using the STAR method
2. Negotiate salary confidently (know your market value)
3. Polish your resume to highlight SRE achievements
4. Review all capstone deliverables into a portfolio-ready GitHub repo

Reading Materials

• STAR Method for Interviews (The Muse)
• Salary Negotiation Guide (Kalidou)
• Levels.fyi — Thailand Salary Data
• SRE Resume Examples (GitHub)
• How to Write a Tech Resume (Hired)
• Negotiating Your Offer (Haseeb Qureshi)

Finger Exercises (prepare answers for these questions)

1. "Tell me about a time you handled an on-call incident." (STAR: Situation, Task, Action, Result)
2. "Tell me about a time you improved a system's reliability."
3. "How do you handle conflict with developers who don't want to add instrumentation?"
4. "Tell me about a project you led that failed. What did you learn?"
5. "Why do you want to move from Ericsson SD to SRE?"

Final Portfolio Review

• Create a README.md for your GitHub repo that links to all deliverables:
  • Phase 1: Observability stack (dashboards, traces, logs)
  • Phase 2: SRE practices (SLOs, postmortems, chaos experiments)
  • Phase 3: GitOps pipeline (ArgoCD, Rollouts, feature flags)
  • Phase 4: Infrastructure (Terraform, Vault, security policies)
  • Phase 5: Advanced systems (Kafka, PostgreSQL, Redis)
• Record a 10-minute walkthrough video of the full stack
• Write a one-page summary: "From Ericsson SD to SRE: My 20-Week Journey"

Salary Negotiation Checklist

• Know your walk-away number (minimum acceptable salary)
• Know the market range for each target company (Agoda: 180K-250K+, Banks: 150K-200K+)
• Prepare 3-5 talking points about your unique value (Ericsson telco-scale experience + SRE bootcamp)
• Practice: "I'm excited about this role. Based on my research and experience, I'm targeting 220K-250K THB."
• Don't give the first number if possible
• Negotiate on total comp (base + bonus + stock + benefits), not just base salary

Time Budget

Final Deliverable

A complete, public GitHub repository (sre-bootcamp-portfolio) that demonstrates:

• 5 phases of hands-on SRE projects
• Architecture diagrams, dashboards, postmortems, runbooks
• Terraform code for infrastructure
• CI/CD pipeline with GitOps
• CV/resume tailored for SRE roles
• A 30-second elevator pitch: "I'm an Ericsson engineer who built telco-grade distributed systems. I've completed an intensive 20-week SRE bootcamp where I designed and built a production-grade observability stack, implemented GitOps with progressive delivery, and operated Kafka, PostgreSQL, and Redis in production. I'm looking to bring this reliability-first mindset to an SRE role at Agoda."