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Site Reliability Engineer
(DevOps Engineer, Platform Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, Cloud Operations Engineer)
IT & Data
Salary
€65,000 - €130,000/yr
Level
Senior
Outlook
Growing
Sector
IT & Data
What does a Site Reliability Engineer do?
Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) keep large-scale cloud platforms and software systems running reliably, securely, and at high performance. You define and monitor Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs), respond to on-call incidents, and work to reduce toil through automation. Day-to-day you collaborate closely with software development and platform engineering teams to identify bottlenecks, improve deployment pipelines, and build resilient infrastructure. Much of your work in Ireland is centred on the large multinational technology companies based in Dublin's docklands and across the Greater Dublin Area, though remote and hybrid roles are increasingly common.
A Day in the Life
Listen: a day as a Site Reliability Engineer
You start at half eight, opening your laptop at the kitchen table — today is a hybrid day. Before coffee has brewed, you check the overnight alerting dashboard in Grafana. A low-severity alert fired at 3 a.m. about elevated error rates on one of the payment microservices, but the on-call engineer already acknowledged it and wrote up a brief incident summary in the shared Slack channel. You read through the timeline, make a note to revisit the runbook later, then join the morning standup on Google Meet with your squad. By nine-thirty you are deep in a Terraform configuration, adding autoscaling rules to a Kubernetes cluster hosted on Google Cloud Platform. A colleague in the Cork office pings you about a deployment pipeline that is timing out intermittently in GitHub Actions. You pull up the workflow logs, spot that a dependency cache is being invalidated on every run, and suggest a straightforward fix. It takes twenty minutes but saves the team hours of frustration over the coming weeks.
Videos about Site Reliability Engineer
Career Advice on becoming a Reliability Engineer by Laurie-Ann B (Highlights)
icould career stories
Some videos were filmed in the UK. The work itself is the same, but the exams, qualifications and pay they mention are British — we include them so you get a feel for the job.
Required Education
A Level 8 Honours Bachelor degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related discipline is the typical minimum entry point for this role in Ireland, and most employers expect this as standard. Relevant CAO courses include programmes at UCD, TCD, DCU, UL, TU Dublin, and the technological universities across the country. A Level 9 Master's degree in Cloud Computing, Distributed Systems, or Cybersecurity can strengthen your candidacy significantly. Leaving Certificate subjects that provide a strong foundation include Mathematics (Higher Level is particularly valued), Physics, and Computer Science where available. Some professionals transition into SRE from system administration or DevOps roles, building experience with Linux, networking, and scripting before moving up. There is no statutory professional registration body for SREs in Ireland, though certifications from cloud providers such as Google, AWS, or Azure are highly regarded by employers.
Required Skills
Career Perspective
Most SREs in Ireland begin their careers in roles such as junior systems administrator, DevOps engineer, or backend software developer before moving into reliability engineering as they gain experience with large-scale distributed systems. Within a multinational technology company in Dublin, you might progress from SRE to Senior SRE and then to Staff or Principal SRE, taking on broader architectural responsibility and mentoring junior colleagues. Some experienced SREs move into engineering management, leading SRE teams, or transition into platform engineering or cloud architecture roles. Continuous learning and cloud certification are important for career progression in this fast-moving field.
AI Impact on the job
AI is transforming site reliability engineering by enabling smarter anomaly detection, predictive alerting, and automated incident remediation that can reduce the burden of on-call work. AI-assisted tools are increasingly able to suggest root causes during incidents and even trigger automated runbooks, allowing SREs to focus on higher-level system design and resilience planning. However, the complexity of AI and machine learning systems themselves creates new reliability challenges, meaning SREs with skills in ML infrastructure and LLM deployment pipelines are in growing demand. Overall, AI is likely to augment rather than replace SREs, shifting the focus of the role towards more strategic and architectural work.
Career Ladder
→ Site Reliability Engineer (Current role)
Related Studies
Employers in Ireland
Organisations in Ireland that employ people in this occupation.
Dublin, Co. Dublin
SRE teams maintain reliability of Google's global cloud infrastructure
Dublin, Co. Dublin
SREs ensure uptime and performance of Meta's large-scale platforms
Dublin, Co. Dublin
SREs manage SLOs and incident response for Workday's SaaS platform
Dublin, Co. Dublin
SREs automate and maintain reliability of Intercom's messaging infrastructure
Dublin, Co. Dublin
SREs uphold high availability and resilience of global payments infrastructure
Dublin, Co. Dublin
SREs keep critical financial services platforms stable and performant
Dublin, Co. Dublin
SREs support cloud service reliability across AWS's EMEA operations
Dublin, Co. Dublin
SREs reduce toil and improve deployment pipelines for HubSpot's CRM platform
Dublin, Co. Dublin
SREs maintain e-commerce platform resilience and CI/CD pipelines
Cork, Co. Cork
SREs ensure reliability and scalability of Teamwork's SaaS project platform
Dublin, Co. Dublin
SREs support resilient government cloud platforms and shared services
We don't know whether these employers currently have vacancies — always check their own website. And if there's somewhere you'd really love to work, it can be worth applying anyway, even without an open vacancy.
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