I'm an SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) for a Fintech startup based in NYC my base is $190000, with options + bonus my total compensation is probably closer to $300k. I've mostly worked in financial for large firms such as Lehman Brothers, Bank of America, Citi, and Morgan Stanley. I now solely work for fintech startups. My career started out as a traditional system administrator working on large Sun Solaris servers (2000 - 2006), I transitioned over to Linux (2007+) then picked up some Java, Python, SQL and I'm now learning Go and big data (Spark) and have a strong background in networking. I primarily get paid to automate and scale infrastructures these days -- my background is that of Google's definition of Site Reliability Engineering, 40% Code 60% infrastructure.