Associate Site Reliability Engineer (Graduate)

About the role

Razorpay's SRE team runs India's largest fintech payments platform — Associate SRE is the graduate-to-SRE entry role, with structured on-call shadowing, Kubernetes fleet work, Terraform infrastructure-as-code, and production SLO ownership inside 18 months.

Razorpay is the payments infrastructure behind a significant share of the Indian internet — Zomato, Swiggy, BookMyShow, Cred, Zerodha and hundreds of thousands of SMBs route transactions through Razorpay's rails every single day. Keeping that estate up, at the latency and error-rate targets the payments industry demands, is the job of Razorpay's Site Reliability Engineering organisation, and the Associate SRE role is the firm's dedicated graduate-to-SRE entry point. It is one of the most hands-on early-career roles in Indian fintech, and the technical bar is deliberately high.

The hiring process is rigorous. Razorpay recruits directly from engineering campuses (IIT, NIT, BITS, IIIT, and a handful of strong private schools) and through referral and open applications from the broader market. The loop is five rounds: an online coding assessment (two medium problems, Python / Go / Java preferred), a Linux + systems fundamentals round (processes, signals, networking, debugging tools — tcpdump, strace, iostat), a scenario-based troubleshooting interview where you are walked through a realistic production incident and asked how you would diagnose it, a system-design round at graduate scale (typically around caches, message queues or load-balancer design), and a behavioural / cultural fit round with the hiring manager. Candidates who can calmly walk through an strace output or sketch a consistent-hashing cache cluster on a whiteboard tend to clear.

Onboarding is structured but intensive. The first four weeks are classroom-style — Razorpay's internal SRE Academy covers the firm's technology stack top-to-bottom: AWS as the primary cloud (with some workloads on Linode and on-premise), EKS for Kubernetes, Terraform for infrastructure-as-code, Argo CD for GitOps deploys, Prometheus and Grafana for metrics, Loki and Elasticsearch for logs, Jaeger for distributed tracing, and the firm's internal tooling for feature flags, rate limiters and circuit breakers. By the end of week four you will have shadowed three on-call shifts with a senior engineer, participated in two incident postmortems, and shipped your first Terraform change into a non-production account. Weeks five through twelve graduate you into real work, still with close supervision.

Day-to-day the role is operationally real. SREs at Razorpay run a primary + secondary on-call rotation — as an Associate SRE you join secondary on-call at month three and primary on-call at month six, with each shift running a week. During working hours you will pair with senior engineers on capacity planning, cost optimisation, new-service rollout reviews, and SLO authoring. Razorpay takes SLO culture seriously: every major service has published SLIs (latency, availability, correctness), SLO targets with error budgets, and public runbooks. Inside eighteen months most Associate SREs own at least one service end-to-end — they author and update the runbook, own the SLO dashboard, and are the primary stakeholder in capacity reviews.

The work crosses engineering and operations in a way that is rare at fresher level. You will spend significant time in the Python + Go codebase writing small internal tools — a deploy-window scheduler, a Terraform-drift detector, a disk-usage predictor — and equally significant time doing operational engineering: debugging an EKS node-draining issue at 2 AM, diagnosing a gradual p99 latency drift, scaling a Kafka cluster before a high-traffic event. The tooling is modern, the telemetry is excellent, and the blast radius of mistakes is real — which is what makes the learning curve so steep.

Compensation at Razorpay for Associate SREs is substantially above Indian services-firm rates. Base salary is in the fourteen-to-twenty-two-lakh range for fresher hires, with an ESOP grant on the firm's four-year vesting schedule, a performance bonus, and genuinely strong benefits — medical cover for self + family including parents, fertility and adoption support, twelve weeks of paid parental leave for all parents, a ₹50K annual wellness benefit, and the firm's internal "Razorpay Runway" learning wallet which pays for certifications and conferences. More structurally, the compensation structure is one of the most transparent in Indian fintech — every level has a published comp band, and internal equity is actively maintained. Career trajectory is Associate SRE → SRE → Senior SRE → Staff SRE → Principal SRE, with typical India cadence of two to three years per level.

A few things to know before applying. Razorpay's SRE team actively publishes engineering content — blog posts, conference talks, open-source contributions — and candidates who have genuinely engaged with that content tend to interview better. Read the firm's engineering blog (engineering.razorpay.com) before the interview loop; two or three talking points about a recent article will land well with the hiring team. Second, the on-call expectation is real — if you are averse to being paged on a Sunday evening when something has gone wrong with a payment provider integration, this is not the right role. Third, Razorpay is opinionated about SRE culture: pagers are treated seriously, postmortems are genuinely blameless, and engineering autonomy is high. Candidates who thrive in high-autonomy engineering cultures clear the loop and thrive inside the org; candidates who need heavy management scaffolding tend to find the role harder to settle into.

Responsibilities

Complete 4-week SRE Academy onboarding. Shadow on-call from week 2, join secondary on-call by month 3, primary by month 6. Author and update service runbooks. Own SLOs and error budgets for assigned services from month 9. Write small internal tools in Python / Go. Participate in postmortems and drive action-item follow-through.

Requirements & qualifications

B.E / B.Tech / M.Tech / M.Sc (CS/IT) — 2024, 2025, 2026 passouts preferred; 0-2 years experience acceptable. Strong Linux and networking fundamentals. Programming in Python or Go or Java (strong — leetcode-medium comfort). Systems-debugging intuition (tcpdump, strace, iostat, perf). Distributed-systems fundamentals.

Why this role in 2026

Razorpay is the most technically credible fintech SRE org in India — modern stack, strong SLO culture, open postmortems and transparent compensation. Two years here is a career-defining credential in Indian product-company hiring.

Application tips

Apply through razorpay.com/jobs. A GitHub profile with a meaningful side project (home lab, open-source contribution, home-grown tool) is a strong signal. Highlight any systems-debugging story on your resume.

Interview preparation

Solid DSA prep (leetcode-medium sustained). Linux + networking fundamentals (reread Beej's Network Programming + the tcpdump man page). System-design at graduate scale — caches, queues, load balancers. Practise explaining a real debug you have done.

Career growth

Associate SRE → SRE (2 yrs) → Senior SRE (4-5 yrs) → Staff SRE (7 yrs) → Principal SRE. Cross-functional moves into Platform Engineering or Security Engineering supported.

Company & benefits

Substantial ESOP grant. Medical for self + spouse + 2 kids + parents. Fertility + adoption support. 12 weeks paid parental leave all parents. ₹50K annual wellness wallet. ₹50K annual Razorpay Runway learning wallet. Flexible hybrid schedule.