Employers

Google employs approximately 2,500 site reliability engineers. Other major employers of SREs include Amazon, Apple, Square, Netflix, GitHub, GrubHub, Reddit, Dropbox, Salesforce, Humana, JP Morgan Chase & Co., and Discover Financial Services. They’re also employed by software as a service firms, cloud computing companies, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations.

Starting Out

Some existing IT professionals make lateral moves into site reliability engineering. For example, a systems engineer who is interested in improving his or her programming skills might retrain to become a SRE. On the other hand, a programmer or software developer may want to become a SRE in order to get the opportunity to manage large-scale systems, so they would obtain the education and training necessary to enter the field.

You can also become a SRE straight out of college if you have received the right training; participated in a site reliability engineering internship at Google, Microsoft, or another well-known company that employs these workers; and are willing to start in an entry-level position. Some engineers started out in the field by first working as site reliability engineering technicians before being promoted to the position of engineer.

Job-seekers can learn about SRE positions by using social networking sites such as LinkedIn, checking out IT job boards such as Dice.com, utilizing the resources of their college’s career services offices, attending job fairs and networking events, working with recruiters, and visiting the career sections at the Web sites of companies that employ SREs.

Highly skilled engineers with strong leadership skills can advance to become managers of the site reliability engineering department at their companies. From that position, they can be promoted to director of software engineering/development, and then chief technology officer. Some site reliability engineers start their own consulting firms or become teachers (at high schools, colleges and universities, or on online learning platforms).

Search for job openings at the following Web sites:

• https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/site-reliability-engineer-jobs.
• https://www.glassdoor.com/Job/site-reliability-engineer-jobs-SRCH_KO0,25.htm
• https://jobs.computer.org
• http://jobs.acm.org
• https://www.cybercareers.gov/job-seeker
• https://www.dice.com

Read ACM Career News at https://www.acm.org/articles/careernews.

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