Site Reliability Engineer Jobs: Complete 2025 Guide
December 5, 2025
Everything you need to know about SRE jobs in 2025. Compare SRE vs DevOps vs Cloud Engineer, explore salary ranges, required skills, and learn how to land your first site reliability engineering role.
Last Updated: December 2025
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) started at Google as a dedicated team focused on keeping production as reliable, scalable, and efficient as possible. Since then, it has become one of the most sought-after roles in tech. SREs are technology operations engineers who focus on uptime-- making sure the company's servers and systems are online as much as possible. This guide will briefly cover what SREs do, then dive deeper into required skills, how to break into the field, and salary expectations.
What Is a Site Reliability Engineer?
Site Reliability Engineering originated at Google in the early 2000s when they brought on Ben Treynor Sloss to run production systems. Instead of hiring traditional operations staff, he hired software engineers and had them automate operations work. The core philosophy was simple: treat operations as a software problem.
Core Responsibilities
SREs typically own:
- Reliability and availability: Making sure systems hit their SLAs for uptime/latency/error rates
- Incident response and on-call: The always-rough on-call rotation, some systems require 24/7 support
- Capacity planning: Usually a joint task with other teams (DevOps, Finance, etc.), but forecasting resource needs can belong to SREs
- Automation and tooling: Writing automation software eliminate manual operations work (toil reduction)
- Monitoring and observability: Googling the words "ELK Stack," "Grafana," and "Prometheus"
- Change management: Designing safe rollout and rollback processes, documenting it
- Performance engineering: Identifying and resolving bottlenecks in production systems
SRE vs DevOps vs Cloud Engineer: What's the Difference?
These three roles overlap significantly, and companies often use the titles interchangeably. Here's how they typically differ:
| Area | Site Reliability Engineer | DevOps Engineer | Cloud Engineer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary focus | System reliability, SLOs, incident response | CI/CD pipelines, developer productivity, automation | Cloud infrastructure design, cost optimization |
| Core metric | Uptime, latency percentiles, error budgets | Deployment frequency, lead time for changes | Infrastructure cost, provisioning speed |
| Daily work | On-call rotation, debugging production issues, capacity planning | Building pipelines, improving build times, release automation | Provisioning resources, networking, IAM policies |
| Software engineering | Heavy—writing code to automate operations | Moderate—scripting and pipeline logic | Moderate—IaC and automation scripts |
| On-call expectations | Almost always required | Sometimes required | Occasionally required |
| Typical background | Software engineering or systems administration | Systems administration or software development | Systems administration or network engineering |
The Reality: Overlapping Responsibilities
In practice, all three roles do similar work. A "DevOps Engineer" at one company might spend most of their time on incident response and reliability—SRE work. An "SRE" at another company might primarily build CI/CD pipelines. The job description matters more than the title. Read the responsibilities carefully and ask clarifying questions during interviews.
For a deeper comparison between cloud and DevOps roles, see Cloud Engineer vs DevOps Engineer.
Skills Required for SRE Jobs
SRE is a hybrid role requiring both software engineering and operations expertise. Hiring managers look for:
Technical Skills
Systems Knowledge
- Linux internals: processes, memory, networking, filesystems
- Networking: TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, load balancing, CDNs
- Distributed systems concepts: CAP theorem, consensus, replication
Cloud Platforms
- Deep experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP
- Managed services: databases, queues, caching, serverless
- Networking: VPCs, subnets, security groups, load balancers
Observability
- Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch
- Logging: ELK Stack, Splunk, cloud-native logging
- Tracing: OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, X-Ray
- Alerting: PagerDuty, OpsGenie, alert design best practices
Software Engineering
- Proficiency in at least one language: Python, Go, Java, or C++
- Data structures and algorithms (SRE interviews often include coding rounds)
- Writing clean, maintainable, production-ready code
Infrastructure and Automation
- Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi
- Configuration management: Ansible, Chef, Puppet
- Containerization: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm
CI/CD and Release Engineering
- Pipeline tools: GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps
- Deployment strategies: blue-green, canary, rolling updates
- Feature flags and progressive rollouts
Soft Skills
You already know the soft skills, right? Interviewing well, complimenting your boss, etc.
Certifications for SRE Roles
Unlike some IT roles, SRE hiring emphasizes hands-on experience and coding ability over certifications. That said, if the SRE role is particualrly cloud-heavy, relevant certifications can help validate your knowledge, especially when transitioning into the field.
Useful Certifications
Cloud Provider Certifications
- AWS Solutions Architect Professional or DevOps Engineer Professional
- Azure Solutions Architect Expert or DevOps Engineer Expert
- Google Professional Cloud Architect or Cloud DevOps Engineer
Kubernetes Certifications
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
- Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)
- Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS)
Linux and Fundamentals
Certification Strategy
Most SRE hiring managers won't require certifications, but they can help you:
- Stand out when transitioning from a different role
- Fill knowledge gaps in cloud platforms or Kubernetes
- Signal commitment to the SRE discipline
And having studied/taken the exams will help you prepare for the technical interview.
How to Become an SRE
Path 1: From System Administration / DevOps
If you come from an operations background:
- Strengthen coding skills: Learn Python or Go to a production-ready level
- Study data structures and algorithms: Prepare for coding interviews
- Learn distributed systems: Understand concepts like consensus, replication, CAP theorem
- Build projects: Create systems that demonstrate reliability engineering principles
- Target hybrid roles: Look for SRE roles that value operations experience
Path 2: From Other IT Roles
Starting from help desk, NOC, or other IT roles:
- Build Linux and networking fundamentals: Master the basics
- Learn a programming language: Python is a good starting point
- Get cloud experience: Use free tiers to build projects on AWS, Azure, or GCP
- Target junior roles first: Cloud support, junior DevOps, or junior cloud engineer positions
- Work toward SRE: Once you have 2-3 years of relevant experience, transition to SRE
For more on breaking into cloud roles, see Entry Level Cloud Jobs: How to Break In Without Experience.
SRE Salary Ranges in 2025
SRE roles are generally well-paid. Not as well-paid as AI or high-end software engineering roles, but enough for a house in most places. The on-call burden and mixed disciplinary requirements usually command premium compensation.
As always, salaries vary significantly by location and company. FAANG and top-tier tech companies pay at the higher end. NYC and SF pay higher than the rest of the country. Startups may offer lower base salaries but include equity. Remote roles may adjust for cost of living.
Factors That Increase SRE Pay
- Scale experience: Running systems at millions of requests per second
- Specific expertise: Kubernetes, distributed systems, database reliability
- Programming ability: Strong coding skills in Go, Python, or Java
- Incident leadership: Proven track record managing major outages
- Cloud certifications: AWS, Azure, or GCP professional-level certs
- Negotiating after getting an offer: Seriously, try negotiating if you haven't already
Thanks for reading! We hope this was helpful. SRE roles are fairly in-demand and interviews can be drawn out processes, but it's worth it if you can get in. Good luck!