Site Reliability Engineer
TechnologyYou keep the internet running — or more specifically, you keep your company's piece of the internet from catching fire. You'll write code to automate operations, define SLOs that nobody meets, and get paged at 3 AM when the system you built to be reliable decides it's not. You're part developer, part sysadmin, and fully responsible when things go down.
Salary Range
Low
$100k
Median
$155k
High
$230k
10-Year Growth
much faster
US Workers
42K
Education
Bachelor's in CS or equivalent + experience in systems engineering and coding
Environment
remote
Tools & Technical Skills
- ▸Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi)
- ▸Kubernetes and container orchestration
- ▸Monitoring and observability (Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus)
- ▸CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD)
- ▸Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- ▸Incident management and on-call tooling (PagerDuty)
- ▸Linux systems administration and scripting
People & Mindset Skills
- ▸Calm under incident pressure
- ▸Blameless postmortem facilitation
- ▸Cross-team collaboration
- ▸Systems thinking
- ▸Clear communication during outages
Learn the skills
Courses and certifications to get you job-ready
Kubernetes and container orchestration
CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD)
Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)
Incident management and on-call tooling (PagerDuty)
What you'll actually do
- 01Write automation code that keeps production systems running without human babysitting
- 02Define and monitor SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets — acronyms that determine your sleep quality
- 03Respond to production incidents and lead post-mortems that blame the system, not the person
- 04Design infrastructure for high availability in a world where hardware fails constantly
- 05Build monitoring and alerting systems that catch problems before users tweet about them
- 06Carry the on-call pager and develop a Pavlovian stress response to notification sounds
Related Shifts
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