Turn an Ops Connection Into a Referral
Cold applications to infra and SRE roles get filtered before a human reads them. The honest fix is finding the one person on that ops team who already has a reason to vouch for you, and making it easy for them to do it.
Find My Warm Intro →Free · No sign-up · See results in ~10 seconds
✍️ Ready-to-send intro“Hi - we both studied at [your school]. I’d love to hear about your path to a company you are targeting before I apply…”
… plus everyone else in your network who can put in a good word.
See who can refer you in - pick your target company:
Find the overlap that ops teams actually reward
Ops and infra hiring runs on trust because the stakes are pager duty and production access. A hiring manager wants to know you will not take down prod at 3am, and the fastest proof of that is a current teammate saying they have seen you work.
Look for four kinds of overlap, strongest first: someone you shared an on-call rotation or incident bridge with, a former coworker from any past employer, an alum from your school or bootcamp cohort, and people who moved from a company on your resume into your target. Shared operational scar tissue beats a shared alma mater, but any of them opens the door.
Turn the connection into an actual referral
Finding the person is half the job. The other half is making the referral low-effort and low-risk for them, because a busy SRE will not write you a paragraph.
- Lead with the shared thing. Open with the rotation, team, or campus you both know, not with 'I saw you are hiring'. This reframes you from stranger to former peer in the first line.
- Send a forwardable blurb. Give them two sentences on what you run (say, Kubernetes fleets or a 200-node on-prem estate) plus the exact req ID, so they can paste it straight to their recruiter.
- Ask for the intro, not the endorsement. Request that they forward you or connect you to the hiring manager. That is a smaller favor than vouching for skills they have not verified yet.
- Make refusal easy. Add a line like 'no worries if you are not close enough to this team'. People help more when they can say no cleanly.
Let FindWarmIntros do the finding and ranking
The tedious part is scrolling a 60-person infrastructure org and cross-checking each profile against your own history. FindWarmIntros does that step: you give it the target company, and it surfaces the real people there who share your school or a past employer, then ranks them by how strong the overlap is, and drafts a warm intro you can edit.
It is free and it does not send anything for you, so you stay in control of the message. The point is to skip the manual detective work and spend your time on the two or three people most likely to actually forward you.