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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Team Introduction
The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team at TikTok combines software and systems engineering to build and run large-scale, massively distributed, and fault-tolerant systems. Our team is dedicated to ensuring that TikTok’s core services remain stable, efficient, and resilient at a global scale. We focus on enhancing the observability and operability of our infrastructure, using data-driven insights to safeguard business stability 24/7.
Responsibilities
As a Site Reliability Engineer, you will be responsible for the end-to-end reliability of our production ecosystem. You will balance traditional SRE functions—such as automation and performance tuning—with a specialized focus on disaster recovery and rapid incident response.
- System Design & Optimization: Participate in the full lifecycle of high-concurrency distributed systems. Collaborate with development teams to ensure services are designed for scalability, reliability, and high availability.
- Automation & Efficiency: Build and maintain robust automation tools to eliminate "toil," streamline service deployments, and manage infrastructure as code.
- Observability & Monitoring: Develop and refine monitoring, alerting, and logging systems (SLIs/SLOs) to provide deep visibility into service health and performance.
- Disaster Recovery (DR) & Resilience: Lead the design, implementation, and execution of global disaster recovery drills. You will simulate complex failure scenarios and validate failover mechanisms to ensure the platform remains operational under extreme conditions.
- Incident Management & Response: Serve as a key responder for high-priority production incidents. You will coordinate cross-functional "war rooms," drive technical troubleshooting, and lead the path to service restoration.
- Continuous Improvement: Facilitate blameless post-mortems and perform root-cause analysis (RCA). You will transform incident insights into engineering requirements to harden our systems against future outages.
- Capacity Planning: Manage resource allocation and performance bottlenecks to ensure the platform can handle organic growth and massive traffic surges.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Proficiency in one or more programming languages (e.g., Go, Python, Java, or C++).
- Strong understanding of Linux system internals, networking (TCP/IP, DNS, Load Balancing), and distributed systems.
- Experience managing containerized environments (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker).
Preferred Qualifications:
- Proven experience in a high-traffic production environment with a focus on incident response and site stability.
- Hands-on experience with Disaster Recovery strategies, including multi-region failover and data consistency in distributed databases.
- Familiarity with observability and monitoring tools.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code.
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 $187040 - $359720 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
Team Introduction
The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team at TikTok combines software and systems engineering to build and run large-scale, massively distributed, and fault-tolerant systems. Our team is dedicated to ensuring that TikTok’s core services remain stable, efficient, and resilient at a global scale. We focus on enhancing the observability and operability of our infrastructure, using data-driven insights to safeguard business stability 24/7.
Responsibilities
As a Site Reliability Engineer, you will be responsible for the end-to-end reliability of our production ecosystem. You will balance traditional SRE functions—such as automation and performance tuning—with a specialized focus on disaster recovery and rapid incident response.
- System Design & Optimization: Participate in the full lifecycle of high-concurrency distributed systems. Collaborate with development teams to ensure services are designed for scalability, reliability, and high availability.
- Automation & Efficiency: Build and maintain robust automation tools to eliminate "toil," streamline service deployments, and manage infrastructure as code.
- Observability & Monitoring: Develop and refine monitoring, alerting, and logging systems (SLIs/SLOs) to provide deep visibility into service health and performance.
- Disaster Recovery (DR) & Resilience: Lead the design, implementation, and execution of global disaster recovery drills. You will simulate complex failure scenarios and validate failover mechanisms to ensure the platform remains operational under extreme conditions.
- Incident Management & Response: Serve as a key responder for high-priority production incidents. You will coordinate cross-functional "war rooms," drive technical troubleshooting, and lead the path to service restoration.
- Continuous Improvement: Facilitate blameless post-mortems and perform root-cause analysis (RCA). You will transform incident insights into engineering requirements to harden our systems against future outages.
- Capacity Planning: Manage resource allocation and performance bottlenecks to ensure the platform can handle organic growth and massive traffic surges.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Proficiency in one or more programming languages (e.g., Go, Python, Java, or C++).
- Strong understanding of Linux system internals, networking (TCP/IP, DNS, Load Balancing), and distributed systems.
- Experience managing containerized environments (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker).
Preferred Qualifications:
- Proven experience in a high-traffic production environment with a focus on incident response and site stability.
- Hands-on experience with Disaster Recovery strategies, including multi-region failover and data consistency in distributed databases.
- Familiarity with observability and monitoring tools.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code.
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 $187040 - $359720 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 88+ 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.