Years of experiences don't really matters to me, I suggest you to read another of my article to understand why I say that: https://medium.com/@madokai/this-is-why-i-didnt-accept-you-as-a-senior-devops-engineer-0e340ad5b511

But if I had to answer your question, I would say:

- After 5 years of experience, I expect the candidate to have strong understanding and opinion on Observability, IaC, Containers and Cloud (multi cloud).

- After 8 years, I expect the candidate to have strong soft, mentorship and documentation skills.

- After 10 years, I expect the candidate to have DevSecOps and FinOps experience. I also expect the candidate to have participating in security compliance papers/audits.

It all depends on the context in which the candidates worked. The most important is their evolution, their progression over time, the obstacles they encountered and how they allowed them to evolve.