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The Ultimate Guide To The Site Reliability Engineering Career Path

Site Reliability Engineering the next thing to grow your career

An SRE is also responsible for making sure that the IT infrastructure can withstand any sort of outage or disaster.

When you hear the term “Site reliability engineer,” you might think of someone who monitors servers and network infrastructure to keep the lights on. While that’s part of the job, it misses a big part of the picture. In the world of SRE, “reliability” refers not just to uptime or how long a service is up, but also how quickly and effectively you can identify and repair problems, how consistently you can reproduce bugs and how well you can conduct postmortems and implement reviews.

The site reliability engineering (SRE) field is relatively young but growing rapidly, as more companies learn how to effectively use it to achieve higher system availability and greater service reliability. Like most new fields, it can be confusing to figure out where to start and what career path to take. The information below is meant to provide guidance for anyone who is interested in working as an SRE.

What-is-the-Education-needed-for-an-Site-reliability-engineerWhat is the Education needed for a Site reliability engineer?

 An SRE is someone who is involved in running IT infrastructure for a company or organization. An SRE is not an SRE if you are just a software engineer and do not touch the live infrastructure. An SRE is basically an engineer who has done the grunt work of managing large scale systems and has worked hard to identify the tools and processes that allow for efficient management of complex systems and has helped build those tools.

What do you need to become a Site reliability engineer?

 The term “site reliability engineer” can be a bit confusing, because the word “engineer” makes it sound like you need to have a degree in order to be one. That’s not the case – although it certainly helps because SREs are responsible for handling a lot of the technical side of their company’s infrastructure – which is what a lot of engineers do. But what makes a site reliability engineer different is that they’re responsible for more than just the day-to-day maintenance of the company’s IT systems. 

An SRE is also responsible for making sure that the IT infrastructure can withstand any sort of outage or disaster.

What is the salary for a Site reliability engineer?

The role of a site reliability engineer (SRE) is crucial to the success of a software company that has to deliver software reliably and for the most part, 24/7. 

A site reliability engineer’s tasks include,

  1. Upgrading and maintaining the infrastructure
  2. Monitoring it, and 
  3. Ensuring that it is able to handle the load comfortably. 

According to payscale.com, an entry-level Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with less than 1 year experience can expect to earn an average total compensation (includes tips, bonus, and overtime pay) of $82,637 based on 47 salaries. 

An early career Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with 1-4 years of experience earns an average total compensation of $104,679 based on 489 salaries. A mid-career Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with 5-9 years of experience earns an average total compensation of $121,310 based on 409 salaries. 

An experienced Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with 10-19 years of experience earns an average total compensation of $134,942 based on 298 salaries. In their late career (20 years and higher), employees earn an average total compensation of $138,451. 

SRE allows you to learn new things and progress in your career. SRE is a growing field and there are not enough skilled site reliability engineers in the industry. Working in SRE requires a lot of hard work and commitment. If you like both software development and system administration, then site reliability engineering is a good choice.

Go dig deep in yourself and find out…

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