There’s a common myth that holds back far too many promising DevOps careers: the belief that technical skills alone are enough to take you to the top. Over the years, working with global teams at Ubisoft, Mozilla, and Datadog, I’ve seen brilliant engineers hit a ceiling—not because they lacked talent, but because they never developed the skills that turn good technologists into trusted professionals. One of the biggest misconceptions is that the only path to advancement is becoming a manager. But some of the most impactful people I’ve worked with never left the terminal—they leveled up by learning how to translate their technical work into real-world outcomes that businesses care about. This talk is about that: how to stay deeply technical while growing the skills that make your work more visible, influential, and strategically important. We’ll explore what that looks like in practice—communicating effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, building influence across teams, and operating at the intersection of technology and strategy. These are the skills that turn a solid engineer into a key decision-maker, without ever giving up the IDE. We’ll also talk about how international experience and language skills can give you an edge, especially in globally distributed teams where collaboration and context-switching are just as important as uptime. Whether you’re writing automation scripts, managing infrastructure, designing user experiences, or maintaining service delivery at scale, these complementary skills can unlock entirely new opportunities. You’ll leave with a clearer picture of how to grow your career without stepping away from the deployment pipeline—and a roadmap for building the kind of high-leverage skills that will amplify your impact for years to come.