DevOps/SRE Interview Landscape
DevOps vs SRE: Understanding the Roles
4 min read
Before diving into interview prep, you must understand what you're interviewing for. DevOps and SRE are related but distinct disciplines with different expectations.
DevOps Engineer Role
DevOps Engineers focus on automation and delivery pipelines:
| Responsibility | Focus |
|---|---|
| CI/CD Pipelines | Build, test, deploy automation |
| Infrastructure as Code | Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi |
| Container Orchestration | Docker, Kubernetes |
| Configuration Management | Ansible, Chef, Puppet |
| Cloud Platforms | AWS, GCP, Azure |
Key metrics DevOps owns:
- Deployment frequency
- Lead time for changes
- Mean time to recovery (MTTR)
- Change failure rate
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) Role
SRE, pioneered by Google, applies software engineering to operations:
| Responsibility | Focus |
|---|---|
| Service Level Objectives (SLOs) | Define and maintain reliability targets |
| Error Budgets | Balance reliability vs velocity |
| Incident Response | On-call, postmortems, runbooks |
| Capacity Planning | Predict and scale for demand |
| Toil Elimination | Automate repetitive operational work |
Key metrics SRE owns:
- Availability (99.9%, 99.99%)
- Latency percentiles (p50, p99, p999)
- Error rates
- Saturation (resource utilization)
Role Comparison Matrix
| Aspect | DevOps Engineer | SRE |
|---|---|---|
| Primary focus | Delivery pipelines | System reliability |
| Background | Often Ops → Dev | Often Dev → Ops |
| Coding intensity | 30-50% | 50-70% |
| On-call | Sometimes | Usually required |
| Typical salary (2025) | $130K-$220K | $150K-$280K |
Hybrid Reality: DevOps/SRE
Many companies blend both roles. You'll see job titles like:
- "DevOps/SRE Engineer"
- "Platform Reliability Engineer"
- "Infrastructure Engineer"
- "Production Engineer" (Meta's term)
Interview tip: Ask clarifying questions about the role's focus during recruiter calls. "Is this more CI/CD focused or production reliability focused?"
Which Role Fits You?
Choose DevOps if you:
- Love building automated pipelines
- Enjoy rapid iteration and deployment
- Want to optimize developer experience
- Prefer breadth over depth
Choose SRE if you:
- Enjoy deep system debugging
- Want to write code that solves operational problems
- Are comfortable with on-call rotations
- Want to work on large-scale distributed systems
Next, we'll explore company tiers and what each expects from DevOps/SRE candidates. :::