below marketmost similar roles pay hereabove market
This role pays more than
69%
of similar roles. Most pay
$144,875–$215,687
— the blue band above.
At the midpoint, this role pays about
$209k
versus about
$180k
for comparable roles.
Based on 240 similar postings.
Employer
About Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is a global technology leader producing software, hardware, and cloud services including Windows, Office 365, Azure cloud platform, Xbox gaming, and Surface devices. Industry: Software & Cloud Computing
Microsoft currently has
694 open roles
on FindRole.
Listed pay typically runs
$119,800–$234,700
across 651 roles with salary data.
The Principal Site Reliability Engineer joins the Microsoft Substrate team to provide technical and operational leadership for foundational cloud platform workloads. This role involves setting reliability strategies, defining SLO frameworks, and establishing operational best practices for services operating in highly regulated, sovereign, or compliance-sensitive environments. Day-to-day responsibilities include serving as an actively engaged senior on-call engineer, leading incident response for complex issues, and architecting large-scale automation, observability, and self-healing solutions. The successful candidate will drive architectural decisions, mentor other engineers, and ensure reliability and security are intrinsic to the service design. Required competencies include software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration experience. The role specifically addresses the technical challenge of maintaining high availability and security for critical infrastructure across global cloud offerings.
What does a Site Reliability Engineer earn?
Median $180200 from 121 postings across 36 companies.
Define and drive reliability strategy, SLO frameworks, and operational best practices for Substrate workloads.
Participate in on-call rotations and lead incident response for services in regulated environments.
Provide hands-on technical direction and response strategy during complex or high-impact incidents.
Conduct post-incident reviews to implement durable, systemic engineering improvements across teams.
Architect and deliver large-scale automation, observability, and self-healing solutions.
Define software engineering standards to ensure reliability, security, and compliance are intrinsic to services.
Mentor senior and principal engineers to shape the long-term technical direction of the SRE discipline.
What we're looking for
Must have a Doctorate with 2+ years, Master's with 3+ years, or Bachelor's with 5+ years of technical experience in software, network, or systems engineering.
Must have equivalent experience to the degree and years of experience requirements.
Must be a U.S. citizen.
Must possess an active U.S. Government Secret Security Clearance.
Must be able to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check.
Must have 7+ years of technical experience working with large-scale cloud or distributed systems (preferred).
Must have a Doctorate with 5+ years, Master's with 8+ years, or Bachelor's with 12+ years of technical experience (preferred).
Doctorate Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 2+ years technical.
Site Reliability Engineering
Distributed Systems
Observability
Automation
Software Development
System Design
Incident Response
Network Engineering
Systems Administration
Site Reliability Engineering
Distributed Systems
Network Engineering
Systems Administration
Monitoring
Observability
Incident Response
Service Architecture
GCC High
GCC Moderate
DoD
CJIS
Site Reliability Engineering
Distributed Systems
Telemetry
Automation
Monitoring
Alerting
Incident Response
Capacity Planning
Root Cause Analysis
System Design
Network Engineering
Systems Administration
Site Reliability Engineering
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Python
Ansible
Chef
PowerShell
Bash
Linux
Windows Server
infrastructure-as-code
Observability
Capacity Planning
Incident Response
STIG
DNS
Firewalls
Load Balancers
Certificates
Citrix