Site Reliability Engineer Interview and Career Path

Role/Day to day varies greatly between companies and often even within the same company. General work varies from creating internal services, building prepackaged internal services, designing hardware specs for servers, improving low level network and OS tuneables, maintain service operations to doing deployments. Career path is basically the same as SWE except there’s a lot fewer companies that offer this role and fewer people in the companies that do compared to SWE Generally I’ve seen the next step being, higher level SRE, manager or TPM. SREs usually need to work across teams and orgs more often than SWE so they end up picking up some good TPM habits although TPM could be lower paying for the same level. So usually I’ve only seen them transition to TPM when they’ve plateaued as an SRE. I’ve also seen some switch to SWE but I’ve seen that less often than the others. Also note that there are basically two SRE tracts. SRE/Systems Engineer who focus more on systems level work and SRE/SWE who focus more on writing internal services. Line is pretty fuzzy even though most companies have them as separate roles.

@apple .I feel this is one of the most proper explanations. I feel as more and more companies move to cloud from on premise,this role will get more importance!