Site reliability engineer (SRE): certifications, study paths and pay
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You keep services fast, available and measurable. SREs treat operations as an engineering problem: set reliability targets, monitor, respond and remove the causes of outages.
See practice tests for this roleWhat does it pay?
What you do
- Define and track service level objectives
- Build monitoring, alerting and tracing
- Lead incident response and write blameless post-incident reviews
Skills that matter
- Metrics, logs and traces
- Linux and cloud fundamentals
- Scripting and automation
- Incident management
What does this role pay?
United States, May 2025, annual wages for the closest official occupation: Software developers, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Pay grows with experience, scope and certifications. Pay in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada and other countries is different, so check local job boards and salary guides. These figures are a guide, not an offer or a promise of pay.
Practice tests that fit this role
Certifications that appear most often alongside this role. Start with the first one if you are new to it.
Study paths that lead here
Cloud native and DevOps path
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STUDY PATHAI infrastructure and MLOps
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Job titles this page covers
- Cloud operations engineer
- Monitoring and observability engineer
- NOC or monitoring analyst
- Observability engineer
- Performance engineer
- Reliability engineer
- Site reliability engineer (SRE)
- Site reliability engineer (SRE) in training
Employers use many names for similar work. Requirements vary by employer and country, and a certificate supports your application but does not guarantee a job.
Related roles
- DevOps and platform engineer
- Security engineer
- Systems administrator
- Cloud engineer
- IT support specialist
- Software developer
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