Why Are Site Reliability Engineers Paid So Much? (Ft. SREs From Apple, Goldman Sachs)

According to Linkedin, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) is the 21st job with the highest global demand throughout the past five years. We approached 2 SREs to get a detailed insight into their position and how you can land yourself as one.

TL;DR

• Main goal is to minimize downtime and ensure systems meet the service level objectives
• Site Reliability Engineers focus on ensuring reliability and availability of systems while Software Engineers focus on development and maintenance
• Interviews are similar to other Software Engineering roles, with a focus on networking, operating systems and cloud architecture
• Median salary of Site Reliability Engineers in 2022 are $6500 (junior), $9000 (mid) and $10500 (senior)

What are Site Reliability Engineers?

Site Reliability Engineers combine software development skills with systems administration expertise to design, build and run efficient, scalable, and reliable systems. 

The primary goal of an Site Reliability Engineer is to minimize downtime and to ensure that the systems they are responsible for are meeting the defined service level objectives. 

What is the difference between Site Reliability Engineers and Software Engineers?

In terms of focus, Site Reliability Engineer’s main focus is to ensure the reliability, performance and availability of systems and services. A Software Engineer’s main focus is to develop and maintain the software.

‍In terms of skill set, Site Reliability Engineer requires a combination of software development, system administration and networking. A Software Engineer would work to develop the software depending on the tech stack.

‍In terms of role, Site Reliability Engineer has a more operational role while Software Engineer is typically more product-facing.

Why Site Reliability Engineer? Introducing Mark and Shing To

Mark Yang is a Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Apple Cloud Services. Prior to this role, Mark was a Senior Site Reliability Engineer for iCloud and worked at Paypal and Qualcomm.

“I enjoy working on the glue that joints various software components together. SRE is a role that allows me to do just that. I'm also pretty proficient at debugging and investigating issues. I have lots of opportunities to do that as an SRE.”

Shing To Li is an Associate Site Reliability Engineer at Goldman Sachs. Prior to joining Goldman Sachs, Shing To was a software engineer at SESTO Robotics and Biqmind.

“The idea of SRE was to put Software Developers in the role of Operations and we would automate everything if given the chance. I think it's a great example of using our hatred of doing menial work to systematically reduce problems and issues. You could say that I am interested in channelling this "Productive Hatred" into creating stable systems. I feel very strongly about keeping the systems in my charge working properly and stable as much as possible.”

What is the job scope of a Site Reliability Engineer?

Based on recent job openings for Site Reliability Engineers from NodeFlair, here are some of the common job scopes of an Site Reliability Engineer:

• Manage production environment by monitoring availability and alerts and promptly remediate any issues that arise in the production environment
• Building and maintaining scalable monitoring capabilities for operational metrics and alerting
• Drive and build automation to enable infrastructure and platforms to scale 
• Consistently evolve systems by pushing for changes that improve reliability and velocity
• Troubleshoot priority incidents, facilitate blameless post-mortems and ensure permanent closure of incidents
• Identify application patterns and analytics in support of better service level objectives

For Mark, a day at work could typically include:

• Code reviews
• Review production issues (p0/p1/p2/etc)
• Design review meetings
• Planning production rollouts of new features
• Mentoring junior SREs.
• Oncall
• Writing Code
• Production Ops review of new features 

According to Shing To, the primary job scope of an Site Reliability Engineer is to think about:

• How a system could break
• How to detect them early
• Automation of any maintenance work. 

What are important skill sets to be a good Site Reliability Engineer?

A good Site Reliability Engineer should have both hard and soft skills to ace the job. Here are some of the skill sets according to Mark and Shing To:

1. Strong programming skills
2. Sufficient knowledge of Operating Systems
3. Production debugging
4. Consistent consideration of the Ops aspect of any new feature
5. Being a good team player with good communication skills

“(On strong technical skills,) Ultimately, an SRE needs to write code that keeps a system operational or informs a human if it could not address the issue on its own.” Shing To

“(On strong soft skills,) SRE is a role that forces you to interact with a lot of different teams. You need to have a can-do attitude and be able to articulate the problem to non-technical folks.” Mark

How are Site Reliability Engineering interviews conducted and how to ace them?

Fundamentally, Site Reliability Engineer interviews are similar to other Software Engineering roles, with a focus on networking, operating systems and cloud architecture (Kubernetes etc.) depending on the needs of the system to be managed.

In Mark’s experience, a typical Site Reliability Engineer interview has a coding challenge, a systems design challenge, debugging challenge and a culture assessment. 

“We typically look for proficient software engineers who enjoy debugging production issues. Being a team player is also a very important part of the job. We want people we can work with.” Mark

Some popular interview questions from popular companies include:

• How to avoid disruption of services in Kubernetes?
• How do you debug a specific problem and which tools could be used?
• How do you define SLI/SLO of a web service?
• Talk about one time when you caused a major problem for your team or organization, such as an outage. How did you deal with the situation?
• What do you think is the most important tenet of the SRE methodology?
• How would you deal with a P1 issue?

On top of these interview questions, candidates would also be expected to go through a technical interview as well as debugging challenges.

How much do Site Reliability Engineers earn in Singapore?

Here’s a sneak peek of salaries for Site Reliability Engineers in 2022 according to our Salary Guide (30th, 50th, and 70th percentile respectively

• Junior: $5,000, $6500, $8250
• Mid: $7500, $9000, $10500
• Senior: $9000, $10500, $12333

This is how it compares to the salaries in 2021 according to our Salary Guide.

• Junior: $4750, $5750, $7500
• Mid: $7175, $7,900, $9,500
• Senior: $8000, $9500, $11000

Interested in becoming a Site Reliability Engineer? Here are some popular companies hiring for them!

Apple

Average salary ranges for the different levels of Site Reliability Engineers at Apple based on user submissions and past job listings:

• Junior: $5,000 - $10,000
• Mid-level: $7,000 - $12,526
• Senior: $10,500 - $15,200

View all Apple salaries. 

Working at Apple? Contribute your salaries and reviews!

ByteDance and TikTok

Average salary ranges for the different levels of Site Reliability Engineers at ByteDance and TikTok based on user submissions and past job listings:

• Junior: $6,570 - $13,081
• Mid-level: $7,500 - $12,100
• Senior: $7,500 - $15,883
• Principal: $20,000 - $39,000

View all ByteDance and TikTok salaries. 

We have compiled the interview questions and processes for Bytedance’s Software Engineering roles!

Working at ByteDance or TikTok? Contribute your salaries and reviews!

DBS Bank

Average salary ranges for the different levels of Site Reliability Engineers at DBS Bank based on user submissions and past job listings:

• Intern: $1,500
• Junior: $4,600 - $5,500
• Mid-level: $7,092 - $12,595
• Senior: $9,092 - $15,932
• Lead: $8,667 - $15,589

View all DBS Bank salaries. 

Working at DBS Bank? Contribute your salaries and reviews!

Goldman Sachs

Average salary ranges for the different levels of Site Reliability Engineers at Goldman Sachs based on user submissions and past job listings:

• Junior: $5,600 - $11,200
• Mid-level: $7,714 - $15,429
• Director: $10,000 - $20,000

View all Goldman Sachs salaries. 

Working at Goldman Sachs? Contribute your salaries and reviews!

Grab

Average salary ranges for the different levels of Site Reliability Engineers at Grab based on user submissions and past job listings:

• Junior: $5,500 - $8,250
• Senior: $8,125 - $11,812
• Lead: $8,667 - $15,589

View all Grab salaries. 

We have also compiled the interview questions and processes for Grab’s Software Engineering role from 290 interviews!

Working at Grab? Contribute your salaries and reviews!

GXS Bank

Average salary ranges for the different levels of Site Reliability Engineers at GXS Bank based on past job listings:

• Mid-level: $6,500 - $10,250
• Senior: $7,858 - $12,306
• Lead: $10,000 - $15,000
• Principal: $14,500 - $19,500

View all GXS Bank salaries. 

Working at GXS Bank? Contribute your salaries and reviews!

JPMorgan Chase & Co

Average salary ranges for the different levels of Site Reliability Engineers at JPMorgan Chase & Co based on user submissions and past job listings:

• Junior: $6,000 - $12,000
• Mid-level: $6,842 - $13,474
• Senior: $8,088 - $15,941
• Lead: $9,923 - $19,538
• Director: $9,923 - $19,538

View all JPMorgan Chase & Co salaries. 

Working at JPMorgan Chase & Co? Contribute your salaries and reviews!

Motional

Average salary ranges for the different levels of Site Reliability Engineers at Motional based on past job listings:

• Junior: $6,000 - $10,000
• Senior: $9,200 - $15,600

View all Motional salaries. 

Working at Motional? Contribute your salaries and reviews!

NTT Data

Average salary ranges for the different levels of Site Reliability Engineers at NTT Data based on past job listings:

• Junior: $3,000 - $4,500
• Mid-level: $6,211 - $8,526
• Senior: $9,346 - $13,231

View all NTT Data salaries. 

Working at NTT Data? Contribute your salaries and reviews!

Sea (Sea, Shopee, Garena)

Average salary ranges for the different levels of Site Reliability Engineers at Shopee, Sea and Garena based on user submissions and past job listings:

• Junior: $4,900 - $8,200
• Mid-level: $6,300 - $8,100
• Senior: $7,900 - $14,100

View all Shopee, Sea and Garena salaries. 

We also compiled the interview questions for Shopee’s Software Engineering roles and spoke to a Frontend Developer there to understand what it’s like to work at Shopee.

Working at Shopee, Sea or Garena? Contribute your salaries and reviews!

Shopify

Average salary ranges for the different levels of Site Reliability Engineers at Shopify based on user submissions and past job listings:

• Junior: $4,583 - $6,917
• Senior: $8,930 - $13,412
• Principal: $11,955 - $17,933

View all Shopify salaries. 

Working at Shopify? Contribute your salaries and reviews!

Are these salary data accurate?

To ensure the highest data accuracy and legitimacy possible for the community, we use payslips or offer letters as proof to verify salary submissions.

Our team will vet through to ensure accuracy and publish thereafter if all is in order. In rare instances where there might be inconsistencies, our team will reach out to the user who has submitted for further clarification before publishing any data point.

While this process sounds tedious, it is a commitment we are willing to uptake as we strive for more transparency and fairer salary practices.

Join over 2,300 users in anonymously contributing your salary!

‍

You can also check out our Tech Talent Compensation Report (Singapore 2021 / 2022) with Quest Ventures!