u/mysticplayer888

But I'm glad Paraguay lost. That was the dirtiest game of football I have ever seen you guys play.

Hi,

In panic mode right now. I received a naturalisation certificate back in 2010, but I cannot find it anywhere .The last time I saw it was when I applied for my first passport.

So now I find myself reapplying for the certificate, and it's asking me for information such as the ceremony date, which I cannot remember the exact date of, other than it being a Monday in July 2010. If I put in an approximate date, would my application be instantly rejected? It's quite pricey to submit the form, so I want to make sure I have explored all options beforehand.

If this isn't the right sub for the question, please let me know where I should cross post.

Just want to check to make sure my new mid-level SRE role is in line with market rates. But also to get opinions on whether the on-call requirements below are reasonable. I've been a dev for 5 years and DevOps engineer for 3 years.

​

Company:

- entertainment industry

- £70k salary

- fully remote

- on call team size is 4-5

- I must be on-call for 1 week, every 4 weeks (so around 10/11 on-call weeks per year). They can't rule out being paged at early morning 3am

- on-call is not paid, I am allowed to claim back time

- must respond to alerts within 15 minutes according to customers' SLO

​

Your turn.

Got a bit of a dilemma, and I need some help weighing the pros and cons of both before I decide which job to take.

SRE for an entertainment company

• fully remote
• £65k salary (possibly £70k if I negotiate)
• 8% employer pension contributions (12% including my contributions)
• performance bonus
• must be on-call every 8 weeks for 1 week at a time.Small team distributed across the world. I don't think on-call is paid. From what I heard, chances of being called is pretty low, but ofc they'd say that...
• genuine decent manager who made clear during the interview that he is not there to micromanage and that as long as I get my stuff done. He doesnt care when I log on/off.

MLOps Engineer for a government department

• hybrid working, 3 days in the office (30mins travel one-way)
• £47000 salary (could be higher if I get the additional £10000 allowance which requires separate assessment and I reckon I could get £2000-3000 of the allowance)
• performance bonus
• 29% pension contribution (~£13000) towards a government DB Pension. Basically guaranteed retirement payout.
• no on-call requirements
• guaranteed annual skills and pay review
• paid for training budget and certifications.
• probably better work-life balance and lower chance of redundancy.
• requires extensive security background checks

The main reason I'm even considering the government role is that it could potentially lead to a more rewarding career given how quickly the AI trend is moving.I don't have any ML experience at all, so this is a good entry. I'm losing around £700 immediate income per month and as well as added travel costs.

Also security checks can take 2-3 months for the government job. So if I reject the SRE role, and then my MLOps job falls through, I will be scuppered.... What should I do?

I’ve been invited to interview for an MLOps Engineer role with a UK Government department. I’m currently an Azure 'DevOps Engineer' with ~2.5 years experience, and about 5 years as a software dev before this. I have zero ML experience, so the invite was a bit of a surprise. But I am interested in moving into MLOps, and this is my first time applying to the public sector, so I want to prep properly.

The recruiter said the interview will be 1.5 hours:

• first half is a technical problem‑solving exercise
• second half is a technical Q&A using the SFIA framework (SFIA???)

They know I don’t have ML experience, so I’m assuming the technical exercise will focus on things I already know (CI/CD, cloud, containers, infra, etc.). I also mentioned I have no AWS experience. So I’m guessing the exercise will be vendor‑agnostic. Still, I’m not sure whether to expect:

• a coding/DSA task
• a system design exercise
• or something more practical like debugging infra issues

As for the SFIA, I’ve spent the last hour reading up on it and it is a bit intimidating. From what I understand, the goal is to use STAR‑style examples to show how I’ve applied the skills listed in the job spec (e.g., SWDN, TEST, ASUP, PROG, SINT, DATM). I’m going through my past projects and mapping them to those skills. But again, I have no ML examples. I wonder if it's an instant fail if I can't find an example for each category listed?

Does that sound like the right way to prepare? Any advice from people who’ve been through similar types of interviews would be hugely appreciated. Thanks.