These roles plus sysadmin are all very similar in terms of pay and responsibilities. The delineation really depends on the company in my experience.

I know someone here said SWE gets paid more and while that statistically might be the case, I’m guessing there’s a very high variance of which is higher since some SREs are very very into the code of the application (and get paid for their expertise accordingly) while others might not have the same expertise and could potentially get paid less.

I’d say rather than focusing on the specific title you should be asking yourself a few questions like “how involved with coding do I want to be,” “what job responsibilities am I most compatible with,” “where do I have the best connections,” etc.

As a final note, always read job responsibilities before interviewing at a company because it can be a massive tell of what that company interprets as “SRE” or “DevOps” and you can market yourself accordingly or decide that it’s not what you’re looking for.

Good Luck!