If you have a passion for coding and automation, becoming a site reliability engineer might be the perfect job. SREs are in high demand as they work to reduce operational costs while enhancing the reliability of the software development processes of an organization.
To land an SRE role in FAANG+ companies and get the best site reliability engineer salary packages, you’ll need a background in software or system administration or systems engineering along with experience in IT operations. Read this article to learn more about the site reliability engineer's salary.
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To help simplify your research on the site reliability engineering salary packages, in this article, we’ll cover:
- What Does a Site Reliability Engineer Do?
- Skills Required to Become a Site Reliability Engineer
- Average Site Reliability Engineer Salary
- Site Reliability Engineer Salary Based on Experience
- Site Reliability Engineer Salary at FAANG+ Companies
- Site Reliability Engineer Salary Based on Location
- FAQs on Site Reliability Engineer Salary
As a site reliability engineer, you'll be working between development and operations and need to be familiar with IT operations. A huge part of this role includes writing and developing code to automate processes.
These consist of testing production environments, studying logs, and dealing with any issues. The engineer must be an expert coder to write the code for these processes. Further, these automation processes help developers concentrate on feature development, allowing them to get new features to the product stage soon.
When it comes to the operations team, it results in a decrease in their workload since an SRE is responsible for automating solutions for recurring problems. Essentially, a site reliability engineer keeps shuttling between development and operations and works on maintaining an equilibrium between them.
The main goal of SREs is to concentrate on automation so that they can improve the performance and efficiency of software development processes and monitor them at the same time.
Wondering what the interview process looks like for SREs? Read Google SRE Interview Process.
Skills Required to Become a Site Reliability Engineer
As an SRE, you’re required to have several technical skills, such as:
- Familiarity with different automation tools to develop and integrate software tools to improve an organizational system’s reliability
- Good coding skills and knowledge of most of the common programming languages such as Ruby and PHP
- In-depth understanding of major cloud providers such as Google and AWS Cloud
If you’re preparing for an SRE interview, read Google SRE Interview Preparation for some helpful tips.
Average Site Reliability Engineer Salary
The average base salary of a site reliability engineer is $133,723 per year in the US (Source: indeed.com). Since this is an average figure, it can change based on the role, experience, location, company, and several other factors.
Further, the site reliability engineer manager's salary is $200,000 per year on average, and the senior site reliability engineer's salary is $140,000 per year (Soruce: comparably.com).
Site Reliability Engineer Salary Based on Experience
As you go up the ladder and gain more skills and experience, your salary will increase in a manner similar to the one given below:
(Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Compensation Survey)
Site Reliability Engineer Salary at FAANG+ Companies
When applying at FAANG+ companies, here are the site reliability engineer’s salary packages you can expect:
(Source: glassdoor.com)
As the table above shows, Google's site reliability engineers' salary is more than the other FAANG+ companies. However, this figure includes stock options and bonuses as well. So before you start applying, make sure to do your research.
Site Reliability Engineer Salary Based on Location
Cities that offer the highest site reliability engineer’s salary packages in the US have been given below:
(Source: indeed.com)
Considered one of the most fulfilling roles of engineering, as an SRE, you might even sometimes be in a position where your work can improve your coworkers' lives. Further, you’ll also be learning about several IT and software development disciplines and consistently work on becoming a better developer.
FAQs on Site Reliability Engineer Salary
Q1. What does a site reliability engineer do?
Site reliability engineers are responsible for developing a bridge between development and operations using software engineering concepts for system administration topics. They work on creating systems and software that’ll enhance site reliability and performance.
Q2. What’s the average site reliability engineer salary?
On average, a site reliability engineer makes $133,723 per year in the US, according to Indeed.com.
Q3. Is site reliability engineering hard?
One of the most in-demand engineering roles, site reliability engineering isn’t an easy career path. To become one, an SRE needs to have development and operations skills or a Pi-shaped skill set.
Q4. Which is better, SRE or DevOps?
To put it simply, DevOps refers to the writing and deployment of code, while SRE is much more complicated since the team takes a more detailed approach while working on the system. A DevOps team takes an agile approach when working on a product or app.
Q5. How much does a senior site reliability engineer make?
A senior site reliability engineer’s salary is $140,000 per year, according to Comparably.com.
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