name: site-reliability-engineer
description: |
Guides Site Reliability Engineering—SLI/SLO and error budgets, reliability dashboards and burn-rate
alerting, production readiness reviews, capacity planning for availability, toil reduction,
dependency and failure-mode analysis, release reliability (canaries, rollback criteria), and
service-owner incident mitigation tied to customer impact.
Use when defining or operating SLOs, measuring error budget burn, improving service reliability,
running PRRs before launch, planning scalable resilient capacity, or leading technical mitigation
during outages—not for CI/CD pipeline implementation (devops), incident program and paging policy
design (incident-management-engineer), cloud access and patch tickets (cloud-system-administrator),
load-test profiling (performance-engineer), rollout cutover strategy (deployment-strategist), or
greenfield cloud build-out (cloud-engineer).
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
When to Use
- Define SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets per service or user journey
- Configure burn-rate alerts and reliability dashboards
- Run production readiness reviews before launch or major change
- Analyze incidents for reliability gaps and SLO impact
- Plan capacity for traffic growth and failure scenarios (N+1, regional loss)
- Measure and reduce toil; prioritize automation with highest reliability ROI
- Map dependencies and failure modes; design graceful degradation
- Gate releases on SLO/error-budget policy (canary, rollback triggers)
- Conduct chaos or game days when org maturity supports it
- Partner with engineering on reliability backlog (timeouts, retries, circuit breakers)
When NOT to Use
- Build or fix Jenkins/GitHub Actions/GitLab pipelines →
devops
- Design SEV levels, on-call rotations, postmortem program →
incident-management-engineer
- IAM grants, VM patching, snapshot restores →
cloud-system-administrator
- Stand up VPC, RDS, or new managed services →
cloud-engineer
- JMeter/k6 load tests and app profiling →
performance-engineer
- Blue-green cutover playbooks and change tiers →
deployment-strategist
- K8s cluster upgrades and Helm platform →
cluster-deployment-engineer
- Customer status page copy and comms approval →
communication-lead
- Org-wide reliability posture, tiering, investment themes →
vp-of-infrastructure
Related skills
| Need | Skill |
|---|
| CI/CD, GitOps, pipeline observability | devops |
| Incident program and paging policy | incident-management-engineer |
| Cloud day-2 operations | cloud-system-administrator |
| Cloud service implementation | cloud-engineer |
| Performance testing and tuning | performance-engineer |
| Release cutover strategy | deployment-strategist |
| Kubernetes platform ops | cluster-deployment-engineer |
| Data pipeline SLAs | data-system-ops-lead |
| Security incidents | defensive-security-analyst, cybersecurity |
| BCP/DRP, RTO/RPO for security/IdP, ransomware recovery planning | bcm-disaster-recovery-specialist |
| Architecture review | senior-system-architecture |
| VP infrastructure leadership | vp-of-infrastructure |
Core Workflows
1. Scope and SRE principles
Service ownership, error budget policy, boundaries with DevOps and IM.
See references/sre_scope_and_principles.md.
2. SLI, SLO, and error budgets
Select SLIs, set targets, alert on burn.
See references/sli_slo_error_budgets.md.
3. Observability for reliability
Metrics, logs, traces, alert hygiene.
See references/observability_reliability.md.
4. Incident response (reliability lens)
Mitigation, SLO impact, follow-up actions.
See references/incident_reliability_response.md.
5. Capacity, toil, and automation
Scaling, toil metrics, reliability automation.
See references/capacity_toil_automation.md.
6. Release reliability and resilience testing
PRR, canaries, chaos, failure modes.
See references/release_reliability_chaos.md.
Outputs
- SLO document — SLI definition, target, window, exclusions, owners
- Error budget report — burn %, policy actions (freeze, focus week)
- PRR checklist — pass/fail with required fixes before launch
- Reliability backlog — ranked items with estimated SLO impact
- Incident reliability summary — budget consumed, contributing factors, action items
- Capacity plan — headroom, scaling triggers, regional failover notes
Principles
- User-centric SLIs — measure what customers experience
- Error budgets drive decisions — balance velocity and reliability
- Automate toil — repetitive manual work is a reliability risk
- Blameless learning — fix systems, not people
- Progressive delivery — small releases with measurable rollback criteria