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Site Reliability Engineer Job Description

Hire exceptional Site Reliability Engineers with this job description template. Covers SLOs, incident management, automation, qualifications, and salary.

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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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

Software engineering in Python, Go, or Java with the ability to build internal tools and automationLinux systems administration including kernel tuning, networking, and storage subsystemsObservability and monitoring using Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Jaeger, or OpenTelemetryCloud infrastructure management on AWS, GCP, or Azure with infrastructure-as-code practicesContainer orchestration with Kubernetes including troubleshooting, scaling, and networkingIncident management including on-call practices, runbook development, and post-incident review facilitationSLO definition and error budget management using data-driven reliability frameworksPerformance analysis and capacity planning for distributed systems under varying load conditions

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Nice to have

Experience with chaos engineering practices and tools such as Gremlin or LitmusKnowledge of database reliability including replication, failover, and backup strategiesFamiliarity with service mesh technologies for managing microservice communicationExperience implementing progressive delivery techniques including canary deployments and feature flagsUnderstanding of compliance requirements and their impact on infrastructure design

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

Compensation and environment

Salary range

$130,000 - $190,000 per year, with senior SREs at major tech companies earning $190,000 - $260,000 or more in total compensation. On-call stipends and incident bonuses are common additions.

Work environment

Remote or hybrid with on-call rotations typically following a follow-the-sun model. The work balances proactive reliability projects with reactive incident response. SREs often work in platform or infrastructure teams that serve multiple product engineering groups.

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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