| Detail | For this role |
|---|---|
| Department | Information Technology |
| Level | Mid level |
| Reports to | SRE Manager |
| Direct reports | None |
| Experience | 4 to 8 years in operations, DevOps or backend, with production ownership |
Site Reliability Engineer job description template
Copy this job description, replace the text in square brackets and post it on your careers page or a job portal.
Job title: Site Reliability Engineer
Department: Information Technology
Reports to: SRE Manager
Location: [City], [office, branch or site]
About the role
A Site Reliability Engineer keeps production systems reliable, fast and observable by treating operations as an engineering problem. They set service level objectives, automate toil, build monitoring and alerting, and lead incident response for critical services. A good SRE reduces outages, speeds up recovery and gives developers safe ways to run their services. The role sits in the platform or reliability team, reports to an SRE or engineering manager, and works closely with development and DevOps teams on the health of live systems.
Key responsibilities
- Define service level objectives and error budgets with product and engineering teams, and track them.
- Build monitoring, logging, tracing and alerting so problems are visible before users feel them.
- Automate repetitive operations work to cut toil and reduce human error in production.
- Lead incident response for critical services, drive recovery and run blameless postmortems.
- Do capacity planning and load testing so systems scale for peak traffic.
- Improve deployment safety with canary, rollback and progressive delivery techniques.
- Harden systems for reliability: retries, timeouts, failover and graceful degradation.
- Review new services for production readiness before they go live.
- Track reliability metrics and report outage trends and follow up actions to management.
- Partner with developers so they can operate their own services safely.
Requirements
- Graduate in computer science, IT or engineering
- Strong Linux and cloud fundamentals
- A cloud or Kubernetes certification is an advantage
- 4 to 8 years in operations, DevOps or backend, with production ownership
KRAs and KPIs for a Site Reliability Engineer
Key result areas for the appraisal form, each with a KPI you can measure every month or quarter.
| Key result area | How to measure it |
|---|---|
| Reliability | Service level objectives met for critical services each month |
| Incident recovery | Mean time to recover for major incidents kept within the agreed target |
| Toil reduction | Manual operational work reduced through automation each quarter |
| Observability | Critical services covered by alerts that catch issues before users report them |
| Capacity | No outage caused by capacity being exceeded at peak |
| Postmortems | Major incidents reviewed with action items closed on time |
Skills and tools
Tools used day to day: Prometheus, Grafana, Kubernetes, Terraform, PagerDuty, AWS, Python.
Reporting line and career path
Next roles: Senior Site Reliability Engineer, SRE Lead, Platform Engineering Manager
Interview questions for a Site Reliability Engineer
- How do you set a service level objective and an error budget for a service?
- Walk me through leading a major production incident from alert to recovery.
- What does a good blameless postmortem look like and what makes it fail?
- How do you decide what operational work to automate first?
- How do you make a deployment safer with canary and rollback?
- How do you plan capacity for a traffic spike like a sale event?
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What does a site reliability engineer do?
A site reliability engineer keeps production systems reliable and fast by treating operations as engineering. They set service level objectives, build monitoring, automate repetitive work, lead incidents and plan capacity. They give developers safe ways to deploy and run services, so the business faces fewer outages and recovers quickly when something breaks.
What is the difference between an SRE and a DevOps engineer?
DevOps focuses on the pipeline from code to deployment: automation, CI and CD and infrastructure. An SRE focuses on how systems behave in production: reliability, service level objectives, incidents and capacity. The roles overlap heavily and share tools, but SRE work centres on keeping live systems healthy while DevOps centres on shipping changes.
What skills do you need to become an SRE?
You need strong Linux, networking and cloud fundamentals, scripting or programming, and hands on experience with monitoring and incident response. Understanding distributed systems, capacity planning and reliability patterns matters a lot. Many SREs come from DevOps, system administration or backend development after they take on production ownership and on call duty.