Site Reliability Engineer
Also advertised as: air conditioning engineer, building services engineer, heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration engineer, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and refrigeration engineer, HVAC project engineer, HVAC service engineer
Applies software engineering to keep large systems reliable at scale.
What the job involves
Site reliability engineers treat operations as a software problem, writing tools and automation to reduce manual work and prevent outages. You define reliability targets, investigate incidents and build systems that recover automatically. The role blends coding, systems knowledge and incident response.
Typical responsibilities
- Define and track service level objectives
- Automate incident detection and response
- Investigate outages and write blameless postmortems
- Reduce manual operational work through tooling
- Advise development teams on reliability
Common employers
- Technology companies
- Streaming and media platforms
- Banks
- E-commerce companies
Pay, hours and working environment
Typical pay
£35,000 – £45,000 a year
With experience
£60,000 – £95,000 a year
Typical hours
37.5 hours, with on-call rotas for major incidents
Working environment
Remote or hybrid, cloud-based systems
Remote working
remote
Demand for this work
high
Pay ranges are indicative guidance drawn from advertised UK vacancies and published careers information. They are not an offer, and actual pay varies by employer, location and experience.
Skills and qualifications
Core skills
- Programming
- Distributed systems
- Monitoring and observability
- Incident management
- Cloud infrastructure
- Automation
Transferable skills you may already have
- Analytical troubleshooting
- Calm decision making under pressure
- Cross-team communication
Requirements employers ask for
- Programming
- Distributed systems
- Monitoring and observability
- Incident management
- Cloud infrastructure
- Automation
- No formal qualification required; strong software or infrastructure background expected
- mechanics
- engineering principles
- perform scientific research
- mechanical engineering
- technical drawings
- assess financial viability
- execute feasibility study
- heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration parts
- use technical drawing software
- engineering processes
- hydraulics
- adjust engineering designs
Useful but not essential
- Analytical troubleshooting
- Calm decision making under pressure
- Cross-team communication
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator
- Computer science degree
- industrial heating systems
- advise architects
- record test data
- design prototypes
- ventilation systems
- design ventilation network
- create technical plans
- product data management
Helpful qualifications
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator
- Computer science degree
Ways into this career
A degree is only one route. Where an apprenticeship, work-experience or qualification route exists, it is listed here alongside the academic option.
Apprenticeships and work-based routes
- DevOps Engineer (Level 4)
Degree and college routes
- Related subject: Computer science
- Related subject: Software engineering
- Related subject: Maths
Where this career can lead
next
Senior SRE
next
Principal Engineer
next
Engineering Manager
The good parts and the hard parts
What people enjoy
- Excellent salaries at senior level
- Highly transferable skillset
- Works on systems used by millions
What people find hard
- On-call pages can disrupt evenings and weekends
- High-pressure incidents with real business impact
Common questions
- Do you need a degree to become a site reliability engineer?
- No. As well as degree routes, this career can be entered through an apprenticeship or by building experience and qualifications on the job. preferred
- How much does a site reliability engineer earn in the UK?
- Typical advertised pay runs from £35,000 to £45,000 a year, rising towards £95,000 with experience. Figures are indicative guidance rather than an offer.
- What skills transfer into this career?
- Skills that transfer well include Analytical troubleshooting, Calm decision making under pressure, Cross-team communication.
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Where this information comes from
- National Careers Service
- Institute for Apprenticeships
Last reviewed 15 September 2026.
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