DevOps vs SRE vs Platform Engineer
How these cloud operations roles differ in focus, skills, and career paths—and how to choose the right path.
How the roles differ
DevOps Engineer
Focuses on bridging development and operations: CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, deployment automation, and tooling that speeds up delivery. Often embedded in product teams or a central DevOps team.
Typical skills: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Terraform, Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS/Azure/GCP.
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
Focuses on reliability, availability, and performance of production systems. Uses SLOs, error budgets, incident management, and automation to reduce toil. Often owns on-call and post-incident reviews.
Typical skills: Prometheus, Grafana, PagerDuty, SLO/SLI design, chaos engineering, runbooks.
Platform Engineer
Builds internal developer platforms (IDPs) and self-service tooling so product teams can ship without waiting on central ops. Focus on golden paths, developer experience, and platform-as-a-product.
Typical skills: Backstage, Kubernetes, GitOps (ArgoCD, Flux), service mesh, Terraform/Pulumi.
Salary guides
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