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DevOps / Site Reliability Engineering
Keep production running at 3am. One of the best-paid engineering lanes.
Entry earning
$90k
Junior DevOps
Senior tier earning
$270k
Staff SRE / Principal
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook
Words with a dotted underline are industry terms. Hover or tap for a plain-English definition.
What the job actually looks like
DevOps / Site Reliability Engineers keep software running in production. When your favorite app goes down at 3am, they're the ones paged to fix it. Day-to-day is coding, setting up cloud infrastructure, and building tools to prevent outages.
Paths inside the field
Pick a branch to retrace the arc
Click any specialization. The timeline and salary curve above update to match.
The full arc
How this career unfolds
Junior DevOps
DevOps Engineer
Senior SRE
Staff SRE / Principal
Surprising fact
SREs at top tech companies often out-earn software engineers of the same level by 10 to 20% because on-call pager duty is priced into total comp.
Two ways in
Education paths & payback
Standard route
Public CS degree + cloud certs
Total cost
$55k
Length
4 yrs
How we calculate it: total education cost ÷ (15% of first-year pay put toward paying it back).
Standard route
Private CS degree
Total cost
$230k
Length
4 yrs
How we calculate it: total education cost ÷ (15% of first-year pay put toward paying it back).
The real cost will be different for you
The numbers above are medians from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The price you actually pay depends on financial aid, scholarships, family help, state residency, and which schools accept you. A "$250k" private university is often $60k to $120k after aid. A "cheap" community college can still be out of reach without a plan. Use these as a starting point, then get real quotes from the specific schools you're considering.
Location matters
How pay changes by metro
Pay differs by about 20-35% across the country. Cost of living often cancels most of it.
| Metro | Pay at Senior SRE |
|---|---|
San Francisco Bay Area, CA | $250k |
New York City, NY | $241k |
Seattle, WA | $226k |
Boston, MA | $218k |
Washington, DC | $216k |
Los Angeles, CA | $213k |
Denver, CO | $196k |
Chicago, IL | $192k |
Austin, TX | $191k |
Atlanta, GA | $181k |
Dallas–Fort Worth, TX | $179k |
Phoenix, AZ | $174k |
Nashville, TN | $170k |
Indianapolis, IN | $163k |
Rural / small metro | $144k |
How to read this: Pay is US median for Senior SRE scaled by BLS metro wage data. Cost of living index is C2ER (US avg = 100). A means that metro isn't just paid better. It's essentially required to work at the top of this field.
Start now
What you can do in high school
Classes & electives
- AP Computer Science
- Calculus
- Statistics
- Physics
Things to try outside class
- Build something, even a small website, app, or script
- Try free courses on freeCodeCamp, CS50, or Khan Academy
- Join robotics, coding club, or a hackathon
- Contribute to an open-source project on GitHub
Read, listen, watch
The cheapest way to find out whether you actually like a field is to read what people in it read.
- 'The Pragmatic Programmer' by Hunt & Thomas (habits of good engineers)
- 'Soul of a New Machine' by Tracy Kidder (how computers actually get built)
- Hacker News daily (news.ycombinator.com) and Lenny's Newsletter
- The Changelog and Lex Fridman podcasts
None of this is required. It's just the lowest-friction way to find out if you actually like this kind of work before you commit money or time.
Salary and progression source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook (bls.gov/ooh). Figures are medians or typical ranges in today's dollars; real outcomes vary by employer, city, and specialty.