How to Become a Site Reliability Engineer [+Career & Salary Guide]

As today’s IT organizations navigate the demands of business teams and customers within an increasingly complex tech environment, reducing the risk of outages and incidents has become an absolute necessity. However, for many organizations, maintaining the resilience, reliability and stability of their systems is challenged by the adoption of hybrid technology stacks and the increasing scale of their operations. This is why the site reliability engineer (SRE) position has become one of the fastest-growing roles in IT.

The latest Global SRE Pulse report by the DevOps Institute found that 62% of IT companies surveyed have adopted some level of site reliability engineering. This is a sizable increase from 2021’s 22% adoption rate and 2020’s 15% adoption rate. Companies recognize that application performance and reliability are top priorities and they need SREs to manage the automation, observability and responsiveness to support more efficient and rapid software deployments.

This can be a great career choice if you enjoy designing high-level automation and finding effective software solutions to complex problems. Read on to learn more about this increasingly important field, including the steps you can take to become a site reliability engineer.

What Is Site Reliability Engineering?

Site reliability engineering integrates software engineering practices and principles to maintain and support an organization’s IT infrastructure and system operations. Google first introduced the concept of site reliability engineering in 2003 as a bridge between their development and operations teams in an attempt to improve the reliability, efficiency and scalability of their large-scale sites. 

Google’s own definition of SRE is “what you get when you treat operations as if it’s a software problem.” SRE applies software engineering approaches to system administration topics to: 

• Find efficient solutions to engineering problems;
• Design reliable and scalable service architectures; and 
• Find automation opportunities for system administration tasks.

Over the past 20+ years, other large tech companies have also adopted this process to improve their system reliability and scalability. Though every SRE team is different, they’re usually composed of software engineers dedicated to creating software and automated processes to improve system reliability. These teams are on call to quickly respond to incidents and work proactively to address outages and prevent them from occurring.

What Does an SRE Do?

The main focus of a site reliability engineer is to optimize a system’s performance, stability and reliability. An SRE solves problems with operations and reliability by designing and implementing solutions that are scalable and technically feasible. This is also referred to as non-abstract large system design.

SREs mainly focus on enhancing system availability, safety, health and uptime. They work to keep important, revenue-critical systems up and running despite unforeseen incidents, bandwidth outages, configuration errors and emergencies. It’s a highly collaborative position, as SREs are often on call to support development and operations teams when necessary and are responsible for implementing services that will aid IT and support teams. 

Specific SRE job responsibilities will vary based on the job, company or industry. Some example responsibilities include:

• Finding scalable, technically feasible solutions to complex system problems
• Securing an organization’s applications and infrastructure
• Performing post-mortems or post-incident evaluations to improve the reliability of service
• Creating automated processes for operational aspects such as deployments, monitoring and infrastructure management
• Configuring the monitoring and logging of systems to detect issues and alert teams
• Addressing escalation issues by channeling them to the right people and teams
• Optimizing system reliability by improving on-call processes and support
• Creating documentation so other teams can access information when needed

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What’s the Difference Between SRE and DevOps?

Though similar in many areas — such as working between development and operations and automating processes — SRE and DevOps differ in focus. DevOps is more about moving software efficiently through the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. SRE’s focus is on maximizing a system’s reliability and stability.

DevOps is a higher-level concept more concerned about the speed of delivery for application changes, as their priority is to release small changes more often. A DevOps engineer is part of both development and operations, responsible for working on code with the development team, testing it and overseeing the code release into production.

SRE is more concerned with how to implement DevOps processes and principles to solve problems with operations, scale and reliability, with the priority of keeping systems stable while supporting the fast changes made possible by DevOps. SRE reviews the DevOps methods and monitors progress by taking a prescriptive approach to plan, build, implement, measure and achieve DevOps objectives 

What Are SRE-Related Jobs and Average Salaries?

The salaries of a site reliability engineer will vary based on location, experience and company. According to Salary.com, the average SRE salary will range between $86,640 and $101,387. 

Similar careers include:

• DevOps Engineer — An IT professional who works in both software development and operations. They’re responsible for establishing the processes and automation tools across the CI/CD pipelines to ensure that software code development and deployment are fast, efficient and stable. DevOps engineers earn an average base salary of $124,671.*
  
  See our companion blog post for a full breakdown of the DevOps career path.
• Computer Network Architect — An IT professional who designs and implements data communication networks for organizations. They are responsible for implementing and overseeing local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs) and intranets. Computer network architects earn an average base salary of $123,130.*
• Automation and Robotics Engineer — An IT professional who designs, develops and maintains systems that automate tasks and processes using robotics and various automation technologies. They’re responsible for designing, deploying and maintaining the electrical, mechanical and software components of automated systems. Automation and robotics engineers earn an average base salary of $114,962.*
• Integration Specialist — An IT professional who specializes in connecting and integrating different software systems, applications and technologies within an organization. They work to enable seamless communication and data flow between disparate systems, ensuring that they work together efficiently and effectively. Integration specialists earn an average salary of $119,064.*

*Salary estimates sourced from Salary.com in July, 2024.

Who is hiring for SREs?

While the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t track job growth for SREs, similar positions for software developers, quality assurance analysts and testers have a projected high level of growth of 25% from 2022 to 2032.

A search across different job aggregator sites in July 2024 found thousands of job postings for onsite and remote SRE positions, including at the following companies:

What Skills Are Needed to Become an SRE?

Site reliability engineers need a balance of strong technical knowledge, problem solving skills, the ability to make quick decisions and keep a cool head under pressure. Even the best SRE can’t foresee all possible outages, so you’ll need the confidence and experience to be able to immediately and effectively review issues and look for solutions. 

This is also a very collaborative position, so you’ll need strong communication, project management, documentation and organizational skills to help inform and educate other teams. 

Applicable IT Skills and Popular Tools

• Automation — Ansible, Chef, Puppet
• CI/CD process — GitLab, GitHub, Jenkins, CircleCI
• Cloud computing — AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure
• Container management — Kubernetes, Docker
• Databases and SQL
• Distributed Computing
• Incident Response — PagerDuty, Opsgenie
• Load testing — Apache JMeter, Locust, Gatling
• Monitoring — Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog
• Network configuration — Consul
• Operating systems — Linux, Windows, Android, iOS
• Programming languages — Java, JavaScript, .NET
• Securing credentials
• Source code management — Git, CVS (Concurrent Versions System), Mercurial
• Version control tools – Git and Github

Essential Interpersonal and Self-management Skills

• Adaptability
• Build collaboration
• Communication
• Critical thinking
• Documentation
• Project management

Degrees

Most SRE positions will require a bachelor’s degree in computer science, software design, software engineering, computer programming or related IT field. A master’s degree is usually preferred, if not required, for some positions. While it is possible that some positions will consider hiring a candidate who does not have a bachelor’s degree, that candidate must be able to show an extensive background in software engineering and IT operations to compensate for their lack of formal education.

Qualifications

Most positions will also require job applicants to have at least two to three years of experience as a developer, software engineer, DevOps engineer or system administrator. Some positions may also require experience with complex computer systems and software integration and/or require knowledge of specific tools, programming languages or certifications.

Certifications

SRE or software developer certifications provide additional experience and will make a candidate more appealing to potential employers. In the 2022 Global SRE Pulse report, 90% of respondents said that their management team supported earning certifications, which they considered essential for the job. Some of the more popular certifications include:

• The SRE Foundation Certification from The DevOps Institute 
• SRE Practitioner Certification from the DevOps Institute 
• Reliability Engineer Certification from the American Society for Quality (ASQ)
• Intro to DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering

What Steps Do I Need to Take to Start a Career As an SRE?

1. Build your knowledge — A good place to start is building your knowledge of software engineering and operations through computer engineering or site reliability engineering courses. You can take part-time courses or enroll in a bachelor’s program to earn your degree in computer science or a related field. You can also supplement your formal education with research on your own time. Google actually hosts many of its resources and materials on SRE for free access on its SRE homepage.
2. Gain work experience — Put theory into practice with as much hands-on experience as possible. Look for opportunities to write code and design software applications to develop your skill set — even if it’s not a main part of your current job requirements. Keep an eye out for entry-level positions working as a developer, software engineer, DevOps engineer or system administrator.
3. Choose a specialization — Site reliability engineering is a broad category; you could work as a software engineer, a systems engineer, a network specialist or a database administrator. As you advance in your career and build experience, find the particular specialty that you feel most skilled in and passionate about. A good SRE needs to be adaptable and flexible, so don’t neglect the other areas. Build your experience by collaborating with other members of a DevOps team.
4. Earn your certifications — Earning an SRE or software developer certification will allow you to build specialized knowledge, gain additional experience and appeal more to potential employers. Research organizations such as The DevOps Institute or the American Society for Quality (ASQ) to see the requirements for their SRE certifications.
5. Commit to continuous learning — Dr. Jennifer Petoff, Head of SRE Education at Google, says that “great SREs aren’t hired, they’re actually trained and their skills are honed over time.” As an SRE, your focus should be proactively improving the reliability of a system, instead of just having to react to outages and disruptions all the time. Make use of your automated systems to allow you the time and freedom to experiment in developing processes and new best practices. Building a strong professional network is also a key tool for staying on top of industry trends and learning new practices.

6. Develop your management and leadership skills. All SREs must be capable of managing extremely complex systems and working with a collaborative and focused team. You need the experience and insight to critically analyze an organization’s existing IT systems in order to suggest and implement effective solutions. Look for opportunities to boost your IT leadership skills through education and experience if you want to build a successful career as a site reliability engineer. 

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