Job description template
Site Reliability Engineer Job Description
Hire exceptional Site Reliability Engineers with this job description template. Covers SLOs, incident management, automation, and qualifications.
The role in brief
A Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) applies software engineering principles to infrastructure and operations problems, ensuring that production systems are reliable, scalable, and efficient. SREs define and enforce service level objectives (SLOs), manage error budgets, automate operational toil, and lead incident response for critical services. The role originated at Google and has become a cornerstone discipline in organizations that operate large-scale distributed systems. SREs balance the competing demands of feature velocity and system stability, using data-driven approaches to make reliability investment decisions.
- Define, implement, and monitor service level objectives (SLOs) and error budgets for critical services in collaboration with product and engineering teams
- Design and maintain observability platforms including metrics collection, distributed tracing, log aggregation, and alerting systems
- Lead incident response as an on-call responder, coordinating cross-functional teams to resolve production issues and minimize customer impact
- Conduct thorough post-incident reviews and drive follow-up actions that systematically reduce the frequency and severity of outages
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Applying for a role like this? Practise the assessment free →Responsibilities
- Define, implement, and monitor service level objectives (SLOs) and error budgets for critical services in collaboration with product and engineering teams
- Design and maintain observability platforms including metrics collection, distributed tracing, log aggregation, and alerting systems
- Lead incident response as an on-call responder, coordinating cross-functional teams to resolve production issues and minimize customer impact
- Conduct thorough post-incident reviews and drive follow-up actions that systematically reduce the frequency and severity of outages
- Identify and eliminate operational toil through automation, self-healing systems, and improved tooling
- Perform capacity planning and load testing to ensure systems can handle projected growth and traffic spikes
- Collaborate with development teams on architecture reviews, providing reliability-focused input on system design decisions
- Build and maintain internal tools and platforms that improve developer productivity and deployment safety
Required skills
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Nice to have
Qualifications
- 1Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
- 24-6 years of experience in SRE, DevOps, or software engineering with a strong operations focus
- 3Proven experience operating distributed systems at scale with demonstrated improvements in reliability metrics
- 4Track record of incident leadership and driving systemic reliability improvements through automation
- 5Excellent communication skills for collaborating with engineering teams and presenting reliability data to leadership
Work environment
Work environment
Career growth
SREs advance to Senior SRE, Staff SRE, SRE Manager, or Director of Reliability Engineering. Many transition into Platform Engineering, Cloud Architecture, or VP of Engineering roles. The deep systems knowledge also enables moves into performance engineering or distributed systems design.
Common questions
How is SRE different from DevOps?
DevOps is a broad cultural and technical movement focused on breaking down silos between development and operations. SRE is a specific implementation of DevOps principles with prescriptive practices including SLOs, error budgets, toil reduction targets, and on-call expectations. As Google describes it, SRE implements DevOps. SREs typically have stronger software engineering skills and focus more on reliability measurement and incident management.
What does an SRE on-call rotation look like?
On-call rotations typically last one week and involve being the primary responder for production alerts during and outside business hours. Well-run SRE teams maintain low alert volumes through careful SLO tuning, have clear escalation paths, and provide compensatory time off after on-call shifts. The goal is sustainable on-call where most pages are actionable and teams are not overwhelmed.
Do SREs write production application code?
SREs primarily write tooling, automation, and infrastructure code rather than product features. However, many SRE teams contribute to production codebases by improving reliability-related components such as retry logic, circuit breakers, graceful degradation, and observability instrumentation. Strong software engineering skills are essential to the role.
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