Site Reliability Engineer

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline that incorporates aspects of software engineering and applies them to infrastructure and operations problems. The main goals of SRE are to create scalable and highly reliable systems. SREs ensure production systems' reliability, performance, and scalability while enabling rapid development and deployment of new features and services.

SREs work closely with development teams, acting as an extension of the team, in adopting the reliability tenets to meet Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and thus delivering a smooth and frictionless Customer Experience.

Site Reliability Engineer Role

As an SRE, your key responsibilities include

• Lead and onboard services and teams to the reliability tenets;
• Establish and maintain Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Agreements (SLAs);
• Design and implement scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure while ensuring cloud-native best practices;
• Collaborate with software development teams to ensure systems are resilient (observable, fault-tolerant, recoverable, scalable) and performant;
• Implement monitoring, alerting, logging, and tracing solutions to detect and respond to incidents;
• Lead incident response efforts, ensuring quick resolution and minimal downtime, and conduct RCA/post-mortems;
• Automate every operational task, with a special focus on fast incident detection & recovery;
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement and knowledge sharing;
• Communicate effectively with stakeholders, providing updates on system reliability and performance;
• Participate in on-call rotation to provide 24/7 support for production systems.

Site Reliability Engineering Performance Indicators

Main KPIs that aid in understanding the impact and success of the SRE function include:

• SLA and SLO compliance;
• SLO Coverage and Detection Ratio;
• MTTD - Mean time to detect;
• MTTA - Mean time to acknowledge;
• MTTR - Mean time to resolve.

Qualifications and Skills

The desired profile for a Site Reliability Engineer includes

Qualifications

• STEM degree (BSc, MSc, in Software Engineering/Computer Science or related fields);
• 5+ years of experience in software development and/or operations;
• Proficiency in at least one high-level programming language (C++, Python, Java, C#, etc.);
• Strong troubleshooting and debugging skills;
• Fluency in English and excellent communication skills;

Technical Skills

Experience in any of the following is valued

• Ability to establish, monitor, and improve SLOs, SLIs, and SLAs in line with business needs;
• Containerization technologies and orchestration platforms, mainly Kubernetes and EKS (CKA, CKAD, CKS certifications are valued);
• Experience with automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools (AWS CloudFormation, Terraform, Puppet, Chef, Spacelift, etc.);
• Experience with Python, Go, Bash/Shell scripting, or other automation tools/languages;
• Familiarity with AWS services like EC2, RDS, ELB, CloudFront, Lambda, etc.;
• Proficiency in monitoring and troubleshooting complex distributed systems;
• Experience with Grafana, ELK stack, Prometheus, or others;
• Strong understanding of designing resilient and fault-tolerant systems;
• Expertise in debugging complex distributed systems.

Soft Skills

• Communication - able to communicate effectively in English both orally and written;
• Humbleness - accepts mistakes and acts accordingly with a humble attitude;
• Accountability - takes ownership of problems; involves the right people to reach closure;
• Negotiation Skills - defuses disagreements and leads towards mutual understanding;
• Process Oriented - organized and follows defined processes while suggesting improvements;
• Problem-solving - analyzes information objectively; effective top-down problem-solving approach.