What a Site Reliability Engineer actually does
You define SLOs and error budgets, design fault-tolerant systems, run chaos / disaster-recovery drills, automate toil, tune observability, lead incident command, and write blameless postmortems. Senior SREs influence service architecture across teams.
Why Site Reliability Engineer matters in India right now
SRE is the highest-paid infrastructure track at most Indian product companies. Junior SRE roles are rare — most teams hire 3+ years of DevOps/Linux experience as the floor. Heaviest hiring at PhonePe, Razorpay, Flipkart, Meesho, Walmart Labs, Hotstar, Postman, Microsoft, Google, Amazon.
Core competencies hiring panels expect
Deep Linux (real production experience), Kubernetes, at least one cloud, observability (tracing + metrics + logs), one systems language (Go or Python), and incident-command fluency.
Skill hubs to study before applying:
How seniority pays in 2026
Mid-level SREs (3–6 yrs) earn ₹22–45 LPA. Senior SREs clear ₹45–80 LPA. Staff SREs at FAANG-tier reach ₹1.2 cr+. The premium over equivalent DevOps is ₹4–8 LPA at mid-level.
Common reasons candidates self-eliminate
SRE interviews probe systems thinking deeply. Candidates who can't sketch a rate-limiter on the spot or explain how they'd diagnose a cascading failure without saying 'restart the pod' don't make it past the second round.
Common questions
- Can I become an SRE without a CS degree?
- Yes — credentials matter less than incident write-ups. A track record of running production systems and a single great postmortem will beat a Master's at most Indian SRE interviews.