SRE (Site Reliability Engineer)
Guarantees the reliability, availability and performance of production systems with a software engineering approach.
Why this hire matters.
The SRE is your insurance against downtime — and downtime means lost revenue, churning customers and a reputation eroded by every public incident. Their job: define reliability targets (SLOs), instrument systems, automate incident response and turn every outage into learning (blameless post-mortems). Without SRE, reliability rests on the heroism of a few engineers burned out by on-call. With a strong SRE, you arbitrate rationally between product velocity and stability through error budgets. It becomes a critical hire the moment your product is mission-critical for customers — especially B2B SaaS with contractual SLAs.
Key missions.
- Define and track SLIs/SLOs and error budgets
- Instrument observability (metrics, logs, traces)
- Automate incident detection and response
- Run on-call rotations and post-mortems
- Harden architectures (redundancy, failover)
- Hunt toil through automation
- Coach product teams on reliability
Skills.
Technical skills
- Observability (Prometheus, Datadog, OpenTelemetry)
- Kubernetes and distributed systems
- Incident management
- Programming (Go, Python)
- Chaos engineering
Expected qualities
- Calm under incident pressure
- Post-mortem culture
- Crisis communication
Common stack
Salaries 2025-2026
| Level | Experience | Annual gross base |
|---|---|---|
| Junior | 0-2 yrs | 45–55 k€ |
| Mid-level | 2-5 yrs | 55–70 k€ |
| Senior | 5-8 yrs | 70–90 k€ |
| Lead / Staff SRE | 8+ yrs | 90–110 k€ |
Paris market ranges, 2025-2026.
Outside the Paris region, expect 10 to 20 % less.
Sources : Sup de Vinci 2026 · Glassdoor France 2026 · Michael Page 2026
Hiring this profile.
Typical background
Experienced developer or ops engineer with real production-at-scale experience. SRE culture (Google) is mostly learned in the field.
When to hire
When availability becomes a contractual commitment (SLA) or incidents multiply — typically Series A/B, with growing load.
Career path
Senior SRE → Staff SRE / Lead → Head of Infrastructure or Platform → VP Engineering.