How to hire a senior reliability engineer

How to hire a senior reliability engineer, step by step

Here's a step-by-step senior reliability engineer hiring guide:

• Step 1: Identify your hiring needs
• Step 2: Create an ideal candidate profile
• Step 3: Make a budget
• Step 4: Write a senior reliability engineer job description
• Step 5: Post your job
• Step 6: Interview candidates
• Step 7: Send a job offer and onboard your new senior reliability engineer
• Step 8: Go through the hiring process checklist

What does a senior reliability engineer do?

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1. Identify your hiring needs

   Before you start hiring a senior reliability engineer, identify what type of worker you actually need. Certain positions might call for a full-time employee, while others can be done by a part-time worker or contractor.

   Determine employee vs contractor status

   Is the person you're thinking of hiring a US citizen or green card holder?

   Yes

   No

   You should also consider the ideal background you'd like them a senior reliability engineer to have before you start to hire. For example, what industry or field would you like them to have experience in, what level of seniority or education does the job require, and how much it'll cost to hire a senior reliability engineer that fits the bill.

   This list presents senior reliability engineer salaries for various positions.

   Type of Senior Reliability Engineer	Description	Hourly rate
   Senior Reliability Engineer	Industrial engineers find ways to eliminate wastefulness in production processes. They devise efficient systems that integrate workers, machines, materials, information, and energy to make a product or provide a service.	$43-78
   Manufacturing Engineering Internship	A manufacturing engineering intern is responsible for assisting the manufacturing engineers on the plant's daily operations, analyzing the manufacturing process and procedures, and recommending strategic solutions to maximize productivity and minimize costs. Manufacturing engineering interns shadow the production staff, inspect the tools and equipment of the manufacturing, analyze the quality control documentation, and perform related administrative tasks to familiarize themselves with the plant structure... Show more	$19-32
   Process Engineer Internship	A process engineering intern performs various tasks for an organization. These include collaborating with the technical team on cost savings, process efficiency improvements, and technology advancement, attending meetings with leadership teams, and participating in customer trials... Show more	$14-24

   Show more

2. Create an ideal candidate profile

   Common skills:

   • Jenkins
   • Azure
   • Ruby
   • Microservices
   • Product Development
   • Continuous Improvement
   • Corrective Action
   • Failure Analysis
   • FMEA
   • Maintainability
   • Failure Modes
   • Data Analysis
   • Destructive Testing
   • Technical Support

   Check all skills

   Responsibilities:

   • Utilize IR, laser, and probing techniques that lead to the identification of new failure mechanisms.
   • Used RCM analysis on equipment to develop effective maintenance strategies to manage risk and improve reliability of assets.
   • Cloud Virtualization environment, manage with Rightscale.
   • Lead the ISO preparation team for the reliability department support by familiar ISO9000 philosophies yielding operationally profitable results.
   • Produce LTRS system-and subsystem-level failure mode effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) reports.
   • Perform FMEA on new and existing product to identify failure modes and their severity on the system performance.

   More senior reliability engineer duties

3. Make a budget

   Including a salary range in your senior reliability engineer job description is a great way to entice the best and brightest candidates. A senior reliability engineer salary can vary based on several factors:

   • Location. For example, senior reliability engineers' average salary in indiana is 43% less than in california.
   • Seniority. Entry-level senior reliability engineers earn 45% less than senior-level senior reliability engineers.
   • Certifications. A senior reliability engineer with a few certifications under their belt will likely demand a higher salary.
   • Company. Working for a prestigious company or an exciting start-up can make a huge difference in a senior reliability engineer's salary.

   Average senior reliability engineer salary

   $121,562yearly

   $58.44 hourly rate

   ---

   Entry-level senior reliability engineer salary

   $90,000 yearly salary

   Updated December 15, 2025

   Average senior reliability engineer salary by state

   Rank	State	Avg. salary	Hourly rate
   1	California	$151,110	$73
   2	Washington	$141,889	$68
   3	Wyoming	$126,110	$61
   4	Arizona	$121,948	$59
   5	Oregon	$121,124	$58
   6	Texas	$117,405	$56
   7	Massachusetts	$115,843	$56
   8	Colorado	$114,539	$55
   9	Virginia	$110,579	$53
   10	Louisiana	$108,902	$52
   11	District of Columbia	$107,611	$52
   12	Hawaii	$107,537	$52
   13	New York	$105,546	$51
   14	Illinois	$104,959	$50
   15	Utah	$104,688	$50
   16	Maryland	$104,641	$50
   17	Georgia	$104,551	$50
   18	Rhode Island	$104,281	$50
   19	North Carolina	$103,266	$50
   20	Ohio	$102,835	$49

   Average senior reliability engineer salary by company

   Company

   Rank	Company	Average salary	Hourly rate	Job openings
   1	Twitter	$168,933	$81.22	1
   2	Squarespace	$167,873	$80.71
   3	Flexport	$166,921	$80.25
   4	Netflix	$162,444	$78.10
   5	PagerDuty	$160,336	$77.08	2
   6	Atlassian	$159,859	$76.86	1
   7	Grubhub	$158,057	$75.99
   8	PayPal	$157,825	$75.88	1
   9	Apple	$157,349	$75.65	165
   10	Palo Alto Networks	$156,933	$75.45	15
   11	RichRelevance	$156,869	$75.42
   12	Anaplan	$156,864	$75.42
   13	Okta	$156,531	$75.26
   14	NVIDIA	$155,568	$74.79	25
   15	Instacart	$154,374	$74.22
   16	Microsoft	$154,037	$74.06	39
   17	Medallia	$153,842	$73.96
   18	PlayStation	$153,478	$73.79
   19	Sony Interactive Entertainment America	$153,345	$73.72
   20	MongoDB	$151,817	$72.99	25

4. Writing a senior reliability engineer job description

   A senior reliability engineer job description should include a summary of the role, required skills, and a list of responsibilities. It's also good to include a salary range and the first name of the hiring manager. To help get you started, here's an example of a senior reliability engineer job description:

   Senior reliability engineer job description example

   CVS Health Digital is looking for hands-on, passionate people who want to join a high energy and growing team to make a difference in customers' lives and who want to be on theforefront of digital innovation that aims to reinvent what a pharmacy and a health care company can be in the digital world.This role includes closely working with a team of engineers to drive delivery excellence, partner with business and other IT leaders to build digital assets, provide expert level support to resolve complex issues and provide RCA,identify gaps in systems in current digital eco system and provide solutions to enhance overall performance.All of this is critical to driving Digital growth and improving customer experience.This individual will collaborate with digital leaders, business partners, and IT colleagues to deliver business growth and great customer experiencesthat differentiate CVS in the market, while ensuring efficient, effective and SAFe development.As a Senior Site Reliability Engineering professional, you'll be making decisions of a strategic nature that impact our customers, clients, and businesses. Your expertise in analyzing complex data systems, anticipating problems, and finding ways to mitigate risk, will be a key focus of a high performing team to successfully design and navigate the program roadmap. By incorporating your knowledge of business drivers, you will affect change and lead development of innovative improvements and world-class practices.
   Pay Range
   
   The typical pay range for this role is:
   
   Minimum: 75,000
   
   Maximum: 167,000
   
   Please keep in mind that this range represents the pay range for all positions in the job grade within which this position falls. The actual salary offer will take into account a wide range of factors, including location.
   
   Required Qualifications
   
   5+ years supporting environments at scale and leading incident/problem management 3+ years of experience with Cloud Infrastructure (AWS and GCP preferred), container orchestration like Kubernetes, and service mesh such as Istio3+ years demonstrated ability to leverage and maintain observability tools such as Kiali, Jaeger, Prometheus, NewRelic, SumoLogic, Splunk2+ years of experience with GitOps (ArgoCD)
   
   COVID Requirements
   
   COVID-19 Vaccination Requirement
   
   CVS Health requires certain colleagues to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 (including any booster shots if required), where allowable under the law, unless they are approved for a reasonable accommodation based on disability, medical condition, religious belief, or other legally recognized reasons that prevents them from being vaccinated.
   
   You are required to have received at least one COVID-19 shot prior to your first day of employment and to provide proof of your vaccination status or apply for a reasonable accommodation within the first 10 days of your employment. Please note that in some states and roles, you may be required to provide proof of full vaccination or an approved reasonable accommodation before you can begin to actively work.
   
   Preferred Qualifications
   
   Configuring and maintaining Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) Experience configuring, maintaining, and troubleshooting networking (e.g. AWS VPCs, load balancers, etc) Good understanding of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOpsphilosophies, technologies, platforms and tools, SLA management, incident resolution, and automation Demonstrated ability to conceptualize, launch and deliver multiple IT projects on time and within budget Ability to articulate to more experienced management a technical strategy in clear, concise, understandable terms Proven ability to understand and troubleshoot complex problems under pressure Excellent organizational and workload management capabilities2+ years of experience database support and tuning (NoSQL such as MongoDB and Relational such as Postgres)
   
   Education
   
   Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience
   
   Business Overview
   
   Bring your heart to CVS Health Every one of us at CVS Health shares a single, clear purpose: Bringing our heart to every moment of your health. This purpose guides our commitment to deliver enhanced human-centric health care for a rapidly changing world. Anchored in our brand - with heart at its center - our purpose sends a personal message that how we deliver our services is just as important as what we deliver. Our Heart At Work Behaviors™ support this purpose. We want everyone who works at CVS Health to feel empowered by the role they play in transforming our culture and accelerating our ability to innovate and deliver solutions to make health care more personal, convenient and affordable. We strive to promote and sustain a culture of diversity, inclusion and belonging every day. CVS Health is an affirmative action employer, and is an equal opportunity employer, as are the physician-owned businesses for which CVS Health provides management services. We do not discriminate in recruiting, hiring, promotion, or any other personnel action based on race, ethnicity, color, national origin, sex/gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, age, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law. We proudly support and encourage people with military experience (active, veterans, reservists and National Guard) as well as military spouses to apply for CVS Health job opportunities.

   Copy this example

   

5. Post your job

   To find the right senior reliability engineer for your business, consider trying out a few different recruiting strategies:

   • Consider internal talent. One of the most important sources of talent for any company is its existing workforce.
   • Ask for referrals. Reach out to friends, family members, and current employees and ask if they know or have worked with senior reliability engineers they would recommend.
   • Recruit at local colleges. Attend job fairs at local colleges to recruit senior reliability engineers who meet your education requirements.
   • Social media platforms. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter now have more than 3.5 billion users, and you can use social media to reach potential job candidates.

   Post your job online:

   • Post your senior reliability engineer job on Zippia to find and recruit senior reliability engineer candidates who meet your exact specifications.
   • Use field-specific websites.
   • Post a job on free websites.

6. Interview candidates

   During your first interview to recruit senior reliability engineers, engage with candidates to learn about their interest in the role and experience in the field. During the following interview, you'll be able to go into more detail about the company, the position, and the responsibilities.

   You should also ask about candidates' unique skills and talents to see if they match the ideal candidate profile you developed earlier. Candidates good enough for the next step can complete the technical interview.

   The right interview questions can help you assess a candidate's hard skills, behavioral intelligence, and soft skills.

7. Send a job offer and onboard your new senior reliability engineer

   Once you've found the senior reliability engineer candidate you'd like to hire, it's time to write an offer letter. This should include an explicit job offer that includes the salary and the details of any other perks. Qualified candidates might be looking at multiple positions, so your offer must be competitive if you like the candidate. Also, be prepared for a negotiation stage, as candidates may way want to tweak the details of your initial offer. Once you've settled on these details, you can draft a contract to formalize your agreement.

   It's also important to follow up with applicants who do not get the job with an email letting them know that the position is filled.

   Once that's done, you can draft an onboarding schedule for the new senior reliability engineer. Human Resources should complete Employee Action Forms and ensure that onboarding paperwork is completed, including I-9s, benefits enrollment, federal and state tax forms, etc. They should also ensure that new employee files are created for internal recordkeeping.

8. Go through the hiring process checklist

   • Determine employee type (full-time, part-time, contractor, etc.)
   • Submit a job requisition form to the HR department
   • Define job responsibilities and requirements
   • Establish budget and timeline
   • Determine hiring decision makers for the role
   • Write job description
   • Post job on job boards, company website, etc.
   • Promote the job internally
   • Process applications through applicant tracking system
   • Review resumes and cover letters
   • Shortlist candidates for screening
   • Hold phone/virtual interview screening with first round of candidates
   • Conduct in-person interviews with top candidates from first round
   • Score candidates based on weighted criteria (e.g., experience, education, background, cultural fit, skill set, etc.)
   • Conduct background checks on top candidates
   • Check references of top candidates
   • Consult with HR and hiring decision makers on job offer specifics
   • Extend offer to top candidate(s)
   • Receive formal job offer acceptance and signed employment contract
   • Inform other candidates that the position has been filled
   • Set and communicate onboarding schedule to new hire(s)
   • Complete new hire paperwork (i9, benefits enrollment, tax forms, etc.)

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