How to earn by doing role of Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

In the modern tech ecosystem, ensuring that applications and services remain available, fast, and reliable is a mission-critical task. This responsibility falls on the shoulders of Site Reliability Engineers (SREs). Originally pioneered by Google, the SRE role has become a staple in companies seeking a balance between innovation and stability.

1. What does a site reliability engineer do?

A Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) is responsible for ensuring the reliability, availability, and performance of critical software systems and infrastructure in production. Their main duties include automating operational tasks, monitoring system health, performing incident response, configuring and maintaining deployments, writing code to manage infrastructure, and collaborating with software development teams to improve service reliability. SREs also conduct root-cause analysis of failures, document preventive measures, and regularly review and refine processes to reduce downtime and manual intervention. Their work balances operations and software engineering, aiming to create self-healing and highly available systems through robust automation.

2. What is SRE vs DevOps?

SRE and DevOps are closely related but distinct concepts:

SRE is a discipline that implements reliability engineering using software and automation to manage production environments. SREs specifically focus on measuring reliability through Service Level Objectives (SLOs), managing error budgets, and automating operational work.

DevOps is a cultural and organizational movement that promotes collaboration between development and operations teams, focusing on continuous integration/delivery (CI/CD), breaking down silos, and sharing responsibility for the entire software lifecycle.The key difference is that DevOps is broader and emphasizes culture and workflow changes, while SRE defines concrete engineering practices and metrics to achieve reliability. SRE can be seen as an implementation of DevOps principles with a strong focus on production system stability.

3. What is SRE salary?

SRE roles are generally well compensated due to the technical expertise and responsibility required. In India during 2025, average salaries for SREs are around ₹1.57 million per year. Entry-level SREs typically earn about ₹550,000 annually, while experienced professionals can make over ₹3 million. In tech-centric cities like Pune and Bangalore, senior SRE salaries can reach ₹27 lakhs or more. Internationally, especially in large tech companies, SRE salaries are often much higher to reflect the critical nature of the role and scarcity of experienced professionals.

4. Is SRE coding?

Yes, coding is a core skill for SREs. While the extent of coding can vary by company and role, SREs routinely write code to automate repetitive operational tasks, develop monitoring and alerting solutions, implement infrastructure-as-code tools, fix scripts, and sometimes even contribute to the application's codebase for reliability improvements. Coding enables SREs to reduce manual effort ("toil") and quickly resolve or prevent incidents, aligning with the SRE philosophy of automating operations wherever possible.

What is a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)?

A Site Reliability Engineer is a hybrid role that combines aspects of software engineering with operations. The primary mission of an SRE is to ensure that systems are reliable, scalable, and fault-tolerant. They leverage engineering practices to automate operations and tackle the complex challenges that arise when software meets infrastructure.

"SRE is what happens when you ask a software engineer to design an operations function." — Google

Role of a Site Reliability Engineer

Key Responsibilities of an SRE

1. Monitoring and Observability

SREs implement robust monitoring systems to track performance, detect anomalies, and alert teams about potential issues before they affect users.

2. Incident Management and Response

They play a vital role in managing incidents, including outages and performance degradation. SREs not only respond quickly to incidents but also conduct postmortems to prevent recurrence.

3. Automation of Operational Tasks

From deployment to scaling to recovery, SREs automate repetitive tasks to reduce human error and increase efficiency.

4. Performance and Reliability Engineering

SREs proactively identify performance bottlenecks and improve system scalability and resiliency through architecture reviews and stress testing.

5. Capacity Planning and Scalability

They forecast future needs and ensure that infrastructure can handle expected traffic and workload spikes.

6. Defining SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs

• SLI (Service Level Indicator): Metrics like latency, throughput, and error rate.

• SLO (Service Level Objective): Internal performance goals (e.g., 99.9% uptime).

• SLA (Service Level Agreement): Official performance commitments to users or clients.

Tools and Technologies in an SRE Toolkit

Category	Tools
Monitoring	Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog
Logging	ELK Stack, Fluentd, Loki
Alerting	PagerDuty, Opsgenie, VictorOps
CI/CD	Jenkins, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD
Containerization	Docker, Kubernetes
Cloud Platforms	AWS, Google Cloud, Azure
IaC Tools	Terraform, Ansible, Helm

Skills Required for an SRE

• Strong programming knowledge (Python, Go, Shell)

• Deep understanding of Linux systems

• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure

• Familiarity with networking concepts (DNS, load balancing)

• Ability to automate using scripting and configuration management tools

• Incident management and debugging skills

  
  

SRE vs DevOps: What’s the Difference?

While both roles aim to bridge the gap between development and operations, their approaches differ:

DevOps	SRE
A culture promoting collaboration	A role focused on reliability
Emphasizes CI/CD pipelines	Emphasizes system uptime and health
Tool and process oriented	Metrics and automation oriented
Generalist mindset	Engineering-first mindset

Career Path and Growth

A typical SRE career path includes:

• Junior/Associate SRE

• Site Reliability Engineer

• Senior SRE

• Staff/Lead SRE

• SRE Architect or Engineering Manager

  
  

Related roles include Platform Engineer, DevOps Engineer, and Cloud Infrastructure Engineer.

Real-World Example

Company: Google Role: Site Reliability Engineer for Google Maps Responsibilities:

• Develop automation tools for service recovery

• Maintain SLAs for billions of users

• Manage infrastructure and deployments at scale

  
  

How to Become an SRE

1. Learn Programming: Python, Go, or Shell scripting

2. Master Linux Fundamentals

3. Understand Networking & Security Basics

4. Get Comfortable with Cloud Platforms

5. Learn Containerization & Orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)

6. Study Monitoring & Alerting Tools

7. Practice Incident Response and Disaster Recovery

   
   

Learning Resources

• Book: Site Reliability Engineering by Google

• Website: https://sre.google/books/

• Courses: Udemy, Coursera SRE and DevOps programs

• Projects: Contribute to open source or simulate outages and recovery in labs

  
  

  What does a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) do?

  
  

  A Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) applies software engineering principles to IT operations and infrastructure. Their main goals are to ensure that applications and systems are stable, scalable, and reliable. SREs work to automate operational tasks, enhance system monitoring, and mitigate risks before they impact users. Their core responsibilities typically include:

  
  

  • Monitoring & Incident Response: SREs use automated tools to monitor system health, respond to outages, and handle live incidents efficiently.

  • Automation: They write scripts and develop applications that automate repetitive, manual operations (“toil”) such as provisioning resources, deploying code, and managing outages.

  • System Design & Scalability: SREs participate in system architecture design to make systems robust and resilient, ensuring they can scale as user demand grows.

  • Collaboration: They work closely with development teams to promote best practices and provide feedback on reliability and performance.

  • Post-Incident Review & Continuous Improvement: SREs hold post-incident reviews, document solutions, and improve workflows to prevent repeat failures.

    
    

  SREs balance their time between operations (e.g., incident management, responding to outages) and engineering work (e.g., building reliability tools and automation).

  
  

  Is SRE the same as DevOps?

  
  

  SRE and DevOps are closely related but not the same:

  • DevOps: Focuses on culture and collaboration between development and operations teams to speed up software delivery, emphasizing practices like continuous integration, automated testing, and frequent deployments.

  • SRE: Implements many DevOps principles but with a stronger focus on reliability engineering and automation. SRE is considered a practical approach to making operations work more like software development, emphasizing metrics (e.g., SLOs, SLIs), risk management, and system automation.

    
    

SRE	DevOps
Focused on system reliability	Focused on software delivery speed
Automates operations at scale	Emphasizes collaboration and agility
Measures reliability using engineering	Drives cultural and process change
Often specialized teams	Typically broader team involvement

The two frameworks are complementary; many organizations employ both. SRE brings engineering discipline to operational work, while DevOps fosters a collaborative culture for continuous delivery.

Does SRE involve coding?

Yes, SREs do code—often daily!

• Automation: SREs write scripts and small applications (using languages like Python, Go, Bash, Ruby, Java) to automate routine tasks, provision resources, or run monitoring systems.

• Tool Development: They create and maintain custom tools for system observability, workflow optimization, and incident response.

• Infrastructure as Code: SREs often manage infrastructure through version-controlled code (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation).

• Severity/Scope: The coding intensity varies by company and role—from basic scripting for automation to developing robust production-quality software for reliability improvements.

• Essential Skill: Coding is considered a core competency for SREs; without it, much of the automation and process improvement that defines the role cannot be achieved.

  
  

In short, while some of their tasks may seem more traditional IT operations, the defining characteristic of SRE is their engineering (coding) approach to those problems.

Here are some excellent global internship opportunities for aspiring Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) roles. Whether you're open to relocating or working remotely, these positions span top-tier companies across the world:

1. TikTok – Site Reliability Engineer Intern (Singapore)

• Location: Singapore (ByteDance offices)

• Role Highlights: Work on globally distributed ads systems, ensuring reliability and performance with lifecycle involvement from design to launch and monitoring.

• Experience Gained: Automating tasks, performance optimization, system health measurement, incident response.lifeattiktok.com

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2. Citadel – Site Reliability Engineer Intern (Asia Region)

• Location: Asia (various)

• Role Highlights: Focus on automation, root cause analysis, incident management, and infrastructure improvements.

• Ideal For: SREs interested in high-scale systems, chaos engineering, and integrating SRE practices across dev and operations.Citadel

  
  

3. Comcast – SRE Intern (Global Infrastructure, Cloud)

• Role Highlights: Join the Content Data Services team; manage deployment and automation via Terraform, Kubernetes, Ansible; build monitoring and logging infrastructures.

• Experience Gained: Real exposure to cloud deployment, operational tooling, and building scalable system workflows.Prosple

  
  

4. Atlassian – Early Careers Internship Program

• Locations: Global (including Australia, India, US, Canada)

• Role Highlights: Though not specifically labeled SRE, internships in their Early Careers program offer pathways into engineering disciplines, including reliability-focused teams.

• Why Consider It: Strong mentorship, global collaboration experience, and a solid stepping stone into SRE roles.Atlassian

  
  

5. Job Search Platforms for Global SRE Internships

• ZipRecruiter: Lists 1,000+ SRE internship jobs worldwide with hourly pay ranging from $14 to $88.ZipRecruiter

• Indeed: Offers many global “Site Reliability Engineering Internship” listings, including remote and multi-location roles.

Final Thoughts

Site Reliability Engineers are the guardians of system stability and performance in modern tech infrastructure. With a strong mix of software engineering and systems expertise, SREs ensure that technology keeps running smoothly, even at massive scale.

Whether you're a developer looking to transition into infrastructure or an ops professional wanting to level up, SRE offers a fulfilling and impactful career path at the cutting edge of tech operations.