OPT Site Reliability Engineer Jobs
Site Reliability Engineer jobs on OPT are available across tech, finance, and cloud infrastructure companies. SRE roles typically require a computer science or engineering degree, making them a strong fit for STEM OPT extensions. Most positions offer the 24-month STEM extension, giving you up to three years of total work authorization.
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Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) at TikTok combines software and systems engineering to build and run large-scale, massively distributed, and fault-tolerant systems. In our team, you’ll have the opportunity to manage the complex challenges of scale, while using expertise in coding, algorithms, complexity analysis, and large-scale system design. We embrace a culture of diversity, intellectual curiosity, openness, and problem-solving. We encourage close collaboration while promoting self-direction. Responsibilities:
- Develop and maintain automation procedures to maximize system efficiency and minimize human intervention.
- Work closely with software engineering teams to design, deploy and operate elements to ensure that systems are functionally robust.
- Ensure system scalability to handle growth in web traffic and data.
- Implement monitoring tools and set up metrics to keep track of system health and performance.
- Participate in on-call rotations, assist with incident management, and diagnose, resolve, and prevent production issues.
- Conduct performance tests to find and address system bottlenecks.
- Collaborate with teams across the organization to define Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
- Practice sustainable user support, incident response, and blameless postmortems.
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field with 3+ years of experience
- Proven work experience as a Site Reliability Engineer, Systems Engineer, or similar software engineering role.
- Passionate about operational excellence through methodical automation and engineering processes using programming languages such as Go, Python and/or any other languages.
- Experience in network architecture, database modeling, cloud systems and large-scale distributed systems.
- Strong understanding of Linux operating systems and open-source technologies.
- Excellent problem-solving skills, strategic thinking, and a strong ability to debug complex systems.
- Exceptional communication skills and the ability to effectively collaborate with cross-functional teams.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Knowledge of monitoring tools and methodologies (such as Prometheus, Grafana).
- Experience with containers and container orchestration platforms such as Docker, Kubernetes or equivalent.
ABOUT USDS
TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is dedicated to the safety and security of millions of Americans who create, discover, and connect with what they love on the apps we operate. The Joint Venture has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025. Our foundation is a comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity program we operate under defined safeguards to protect national security and secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm. We safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem, holding decision-making authority for trust and safety policies and moderation. USDS Joint Venture helps ensure Americans can continue to express their creativity, discover new hobbies and interests, and build thriving communities and businesses on a global scale. On-site presence across teams allows the company to operate with greater speed, alignment, and agility — especially in areas like real-time decision-making, team development, and integrated execution. As such, the company is shifting from a hybrid work model to a fully in-person schedule up to 5 days a week.
WHY JOIN US
Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy – a mission we work towards every day. We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.
DIVERSITY & INCLUSION
TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.
USDS REASONABLE ACCOMMODATION
USDS is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/USDS-RA
JOB INFORMATION
【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually) The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $177688 - $341734 annually. Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units. Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure). The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.
For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates: Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:
1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
3. Exercising sound judgment.
Responsibilities
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) at TikTok combines software and systems engineering to build and run large-scale, massively distributed, and fault-tolerant systems. In our team, you’ll have the opportunity to manage the complex challenges of scale, while using expertise in coding, algorithms, complexity analysis, and large-scale system design. We embrace a culture of diversity, intellectual curiosity, openness, and problem-solving. We encourage close collaboration while promoting self-direction. Responsibilities:
- Develop and maintain automation procedures to maximize system efficiency and minimize human intervention.
- Work closely with software engineering teams to design, deploy and operate elements to ensure that systems are functionally robust.
- Ensure system scalability to handle growth in web traffic and data.
- Implement monitoring tools and set up metrics to keep track of system health and performance.
- Participate in on-call rotations, assist with incident management, and diagnose, resolve, and prevent production issues.
- Conduct performance tests to find and address system bottlenecks.
- Collaborate with teams across the organization to define Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
- Practice sustainable user support, incident response, and blameless postmortems.
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field with 3+ years of experience
- Proven work experience as a Site Reliability Engineer, Systems Engineer, or similar software engineering role.
- Passionate about operational excellence through methodical automation and engineering processes using programming languages such as Go, Python and/or any other languages.
- Experience in network architecture, database modeling, cloud systems and large-scale distributed systems.
- Strong understanding of Linux operating systems and open-source technologies.
- Excellent problem-solving skills, strategic thinking, and a strong ability to debug complex systems.
- Exceptional communication skills and the ability to effectively collaborate with cross-functional teams.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Knowledge of monitoring tools and methodologies (such as Prometheus, Grafana).
- Experience with containers and container orchestration platforms such as Docker, Kubernetes or equivalent.
ABOUT USDS
TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is dedicated to the safety and security of millions of Americans who create, discover, and connect with what they love on the apps we operate. The Joint Venture has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025. Our foundation is a comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity program we operate under defined safeguards to protect national security and secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm. We safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem, holding decision-making authority for trust and safety policies and moderation. USDS Joint Venture helps ensure Americans can continue to express their creativity, discover new hobbies and interests, and build thriving communities and businesses on a global scale. On-site presence across teams allows the company to operate with greater speed, alignment, and agility — especially in areas like real-time decision-making, team development, and integrated execution. As such, the company is shifting from a hybrid work model to a fully in-person schedule up to 5 days a week.
WHY JOIN US
Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy – a mission we work towards every day. We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.
DIVERSITY & INCLUSION
TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.
USDS REASONABLE ACCOMMODATION
USDS is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/USDS-RA
JOB INFORMATION
【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually) The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $177688 - $341734 annually. Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units. Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure). The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.
For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates: Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:
1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
3. Exercising sound judgment.
See all 71+ OPT Site Reliability Engineer Jobs
Sign up for free to unlock all listings, filter by visa type, and get alerts for new OPT Site Reliability Engineer Jobs.
Get Access To All JobsTips for Finding OPT Sponsorship as a Site Reliability Engineer
Lead with your on-call and incident response experience
SRE hiring managers want to see that you've owned production systems under pressure. Quantify your impact: mention uptime percentages you maintained, incidents you resolved, or MTTR improvements you drove. Numbers signal operational maturity.
Certify in cloud platforms before applying
AWS, GCP, or Azure certifications signal hands-on infrastructure credibility to OPT-sponsoring employers. Many SRE job postings list these as preferred qualifications. Earning one before your job search closes the gap between academic projects and production environments.
Target companies with established OPT STEM extension track records
Large tech companies and cloud-native firms file OPT STEM extensions routinely. Prioritize employers who have sponsored SRE roles before. Browse Migrate Mate to filter specifically for companies actively hiring OPT students in SRE and infrastructure roles.
Frame your thesis or research as production infrastructure work
If your graduate research involved distributed systems, containerization, or large-scale data pipelines, reframe it in SRE terms. Employers sponsoring OPT care about scope and ownership, not just academic framing. Show you built and maintained something at scale.
Address your OPT timeline proactively in applications
SRE roles often involve long ramp-up periods. Mentioning that your STEM-eligible degree qualifies you for up to 36 months of work authorization reassures employers that onboarding investment is protected. Include this briefly in your cover letter or application notes.
Build a portfolio of reliability tooling and runbooks
Public GitHub repositories showing monitoring dashboards, alerting configurations, or infrastructure-as-code projects demonstrate practical SRE skills. OPT-sponsoring employers want evidence you can contribute immediately, and a portfolio removes uncertainty about your technical readiness before the interview.
Site Reliability Engineer OPT: Frequently Asked Questions
Do Site Reliability Engineer jobs qualify for the STEM OPT extension?
Yes. SRE roles almost always qualify for the 24-month STEM OPT extension because they require a degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related STEM field. This gives eligible F-1 students up to 36 months of total OPT work authorization, which significantly reduces the urgency for employers to file an H-1B visa immediately.
How do I find SRE jobs that are open to OPT students?
Migrate Mate is built specifically for F-1 OPT students and filters job listings by sponsorship eligibility. Rather than applying broadly and asking about OPT status mid-process, Migrate Mate lets you browse SRE roles at companies already open to hiring students on work authorization, which saves time and avoids awkward conversations late in the hiring process.
What degree fields support an SRE OPT application?
Computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, information systems, and software engineering degrees all commonly support SRE OPT work authorization. Your degree field must appear on USCIS's official STEM Designated Degree Program list for the STEM extension to apply. If your degree is in a borderline field, confirm with your DSO before applying.
Will SRE employers wait for my OPT EAD card to arrive before my start date?
Most established tech employers are familiar with OPT EAD processing timelines and will negotiate a start date accordingly. You cannot begin working until your EAD card arrives and your OPT start date is reached. File your OPT application 90 days before your program end date to give yourself the maximum buffer before a target start date.
Do I need H-1B sponsorship immediately after getting an SRE job on OPT?
Not immediately. If you qualify for the STEM extension, you have up to 36 months total on OPT before needing H-1B status. That covers roughly three H-1B lottery cycles, which meaningfully improves your odds of selection over time. Many SRE employers file H-1B petitions for OPT employees during this window without requiring you to secure it upfront.