Overview
SREs apply software engineering principles to infrastructure operations. They own service reliability metrics (SLI / SLO / error budgets), build automation that eliminates toil, and ensure systems remain available at scale. The role originated at Google and has been adopted across Indian product companies, where SRE teams sit between development and operations. Salaries are among the highest in infrastructure.
Day-to-day responsibilities
Define and monitor SLIs and SLOs for production services; reduce toil through automation (incident response, deployments, capacity planning); participate in on-call rotations and lead incident response; conduct blameless postmortems; build platform tools that abstract infrastructure complexity for product teams; capacity planning and load testing; design for high availability and disaster recovery.
Skills required
- Strong software engineering (Python, Go, Rust)
- Linux internals and performance tuning
- Distributed systems theory
- Kubernetes at production scale
- Observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry)
- Incident response and chaos engineering
- On-call discipline and runbook design
- Capacity planning and load testing
Education path
B.Tech CSE typically with strong systems coursework. MTech or MS in Computer Systems or Distributed Systems can accelerate. Most SREs have 3 to 5 years of software engineering or DevOps background before transitioning. The Google SRE book and Site Reliability Workbook are required reading.
Career progression
- 1SRE (0-2 yrs)
- 2Senior SRE (2-5 yrs)
- 3Staff SRE (5-9 yrs)
- 4Principal SRE (9+ yrs)
- 5SRE Director / VP
Top employers in India
Useful certifications
- Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer
- CKA + CKAD + CKS (Kubernetes trio)
- AWS Solutions Architect Professional
- Linux Foundation Certified Engineer (LFCE)
- PagerDuty Incident Response Certification