Site Reliability Engineer Career Path | Ingress Academy
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All career pathsSITE RELIABILITY ENGINEER CAREER PATH

From systems fundamentals to engineering reliable, scalable production services.

A structured path from Linux and networking fundamentals to designing and leading reliability engineering practices for large-scale production systems.

Check my level Explore the roadmap
5–10 minutes · No payment required · Personalised result
🚀SITE
YOUR DESTINATIONSite Reliability EngineerLearn · Build · Grow
High industry demandMost cloud-native companies now hire dedicated SREs to keep production systems reliable.
Strong compensationSRE roles are consistently among the higher-paid engineering positions due to their critical scope.
Clear career growthThe path scales from hands-on operations into architecture, incident leadership and strategy.
Broad, transferable skillsYou gain Linux, networking, automation, observability and cloud skills used across many roles.
YOUR ROADMAP

One career. 4 levels.
A clear next step at every stage.

Each level groups the core skills you need — and the Ingress training mapped to them.

01
Foundation
Next: Junior

Build your systems and software foundation

  • Work confidently with Linux and the command line
  • Manage files, users, permissions, packages and services
  • Understand processes, systemd and operating system logs
  • Understand CPU, memory, storage and network resource fundamentals
  • Understand TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, HTTPS and TLS
  • Understand proxies, load balancers and client-server communication
  • Troubleshoot connectivity with curl, dig, ping, traceroute and ss
  • Write Bash and basic Python automation scripts
  • Use Git and collaborative version-control workflows
  • Understand APIs, structured data and basic application architecture
  • Understand containers, cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes fundamentals
  • Understand metrics, logs and distributed traces
  • Understand availability, latency, throughput and error rates
  • Apply structured troubleshooting and document operational findings
Recommended trainings
Linux Foundation
02
Junior
Next: Mid-level

Observe and operate production services

  • Operate Linux, containerized and Kubernetes-based workloads
  • Monitor infrastructure and applications with Prometheus
  • Build operational dashboards with Grafana
  • Centralize and search application and infrastructure logs
  • Instrument services with OpenTelemetry
  • Analyze distributed requests with Jaeger or Grafana Tempo
  • Monitor latency, traffic, errors and saturation
  • Apply RED and USE monitoring methods
  • Define basic service-level indicators and objectives
  • Build actionable alerts and reduce alert noise
  • Create runbooks for common operational failures
  • Participate in on-call rotations and incident response
  • Triage incidents and escalate them appropriately
  • Build incident timelines and support technical communication
  • Contribute to blameless post-incident reviews
  • Safely deploy, roll back and validate application changes
  • Understand rolling, blue-green and canary deployments
  • Automate repetitive operational tasks
  • Perform basic load tests and identify bottlenecks
  • Validate backups and perform basic restoration procedures
Recommended trainings
RHCSA EX200: Red Hat Certified System Administrator PrepDevOps Engineer
03
Mid-level
Next: Senior

Engineer reliability through automation and resilience

  • Select meaningful SLIs based on user experience
  • Design measurable and realistic SLOs
  • Calculate availability and reliability over rolling windows
  • Define and manage error budgets
  • Connect error-budget consumption to release decisions
  • Implement multi-window and burn-rate alerting
  • Design observability across metrics, logs and traces
  • Improve alert quality and eliminate redundant alerts
  • Lead incident triage and coordinate technical responders
  • Establish clear incident roles, escalation and communication
  • Facilitate blameless postmortems
  • Convert incident findings into measurable improvements
  • Identify, measure and systematically reduce operational toil
  • Perform load, stress, spike and soak testing
  • Model system capacity and forecast infrastructure demand
  • Configure autoscaling based on meaningful workload signals
  • Apply timeouts, deadlines and bounded retries
  • Apply circuit breakers, bulkheads and load shedding
  • Understand backpressure, queues and traffic prioritization
  • Understand caching, replication and consistency trade-offs
Recommended trainings
DevOps EngineerRHCSA EX200: Red Hat Certified System Administrator PrepCertified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
04
Senior
Next: Reliability leadership

Lead reliability engineering at scale

  • Define reliability strategy across products and platforms
  • Classify services by business criticality
  • Establish organization-wide SLI and SLO standards
  • Create error-budget and release-governance policies
  • Model end-to-end availability across service dependencies
  • Identify critical dependencies and systemic failure risks
  • Design resilient multi-zone and multi-region systems
  • Evaluate active-active and active-passive architectures
  • Establish disaster-recovery standards and testing schedules
  • Lead major incidents and cross-team technical response
  • Design sustainable on-call rotations and escalation models
  • Improve incident communication with technical and business stakeholders
  • Establish an effective post-incident learning culture
  • Prioritize reliability work using risk and business impact
  • Build long-term capacity and demand forecasts
  • Lead performance and scalability engineering
  • Design centralized observability platforms
  • Establish telemetry, retention and cardinality standards
  • Build self-service reliability capabilities for development teams
  • Create reusable dashboards, alerts, runbooks and service templates
Recommended trainings
Cloud Computing with AWS and Terraform
SKILL ASSESSMENT

Find your level, then close the gaps.

A practical assessment maps your skills to a personalised plan — in about 10 minutes.

AssessA practical test scores every skill on this path.
LearnA plan built around your specific gaps.
PracticeExercises that target your weak spots.
Track ProgressWatch your grades climb over time.
Assess my skills Takes approximately 5–10 minutes. Receive a personalised learning recommendation.

EXAMPLE RESULT68% · Junior

B
A

Linux fundamentalsStrength — solid fundamentals

88
A

Bash scriptingStrength

85
B

Networking (TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP)Minor gaps

74
B

Python automationGood — go deeper

71
B

Git version controlSolid

72
C

Docker & Kubernetes fundamentalsGap — below level bar

55
C

Observability basics (metrics, logs, traces)Gap

52
D

Prometheus monitoringLargest gap

30
UPCOMING COHORT

Join the next Site Reliability Engineer cohort.

Small groups, mentor-led sessions and a fixed schedule so you actually finish.

Start dateAnnounced soon
ScheduleEvenings · 2×/week
SeatsLimited
Register your interest