I want to know and explore my options after the site reliability engineering career. I currently work as an sr SRE and have 7 years of experience. I don’t want to become manager or switch to leadership role in any point in the future (don’t wanna chase high TC). I used to be a SWE turned into SRE. In all of my roles, I have always made sure that I stick with coding and hands-on. However I’m curious to know what’s next after SRE. I have seen folks moved to PM, staff, manager level positions but what is there for someone like me who only wants to stick with programming and technical. I was wondering about various other options such as MLE, MLOps, DataOps, DevSecOps, Cloud Security etc. Can Blind please help me to explore other options? 270k 7 YOE #sre #devops #devsecops #cloud #aws #security #cloudsec #machinelearningengineer #mlops #dataops #career #google #amazon
Why would you go from SWE to SRE? Do you enjoy firefighting and oncall?
Yes, the main reason why I switched was working with cool techs and being sre that satisfies as well. Firefighting and oncall is not an issue as i have seen better and worse too.
Becoming a staff SRE is the way: this means getting involved in higher level technical leadership without having to deal with management responsibilities you don’t like. Coach junior and senior level SREs to be better SREs and help them execute on the Vision of the tools and architectures you designed. Also mentor them to scale this infrastructure appropriately. Coach leaders (SDMs) in product teams to use the infrastructure appropriately and help them adopt infrastructure, tools, and processes that would improve their resiliency.
Yes, this sounds like a goal however I do think that it will take me away from being hands-on.
Still very hands on usually in the right org since your manager peers will also handle some staff responsibilities. You’ll still be hands-on while also advising as needed. Not having management responsibilities means less meetings in general.
Have you tried Google ? SRE is not Devops at Gooogle!
Really? Then what is it? I feel sre is like a glorified support with some automation if it’s not devops
DevOps
SRE and DevOps are identical. It’s the company how they want to define whether it should be devops or sre.
Convert back to swe