CareerDev4AI

Site Reliability Engineer

Keeps production systems healthy and available by defining service objectives, building observability, and making infrastructure failure boring.

Technology & Software Senior level $120,000 - $180,000 / year

What the role involves

  • Define and defend service level objectives and error budgets with product teams
  • Build dashboards, alerts and on-call rotations that surface real user impact
  • Run incident response, write post-mortems and land durable follow-up actions
  • Reduce toil through automation and capacity engineering
  • Lead blameless post-incident reviews and share learning across teams

Core skills

  • Linux System Administration (level 5/5)
  • Observability (Prometheus / Grafana) (level 4/5)
  • Incident Response & Post-Mortems (level 4/5)
  • Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) (level 4/5)
  • Capacity Planning & Scaling (level 4/5)
  • Networking & Security (VPC, DNS, TLS) (level 3/5)
  • Distributed Systems (level 4/5)

Preferred skills

  • Kubernetes
  • Go / Python for Automation
  • Chaos Engineering

Tools

PrometheusGrafanaAlertmanagerTerraformKubernetesGrafana LokiPagerDutyLinux

Experience expected

3-6 years in SRE, DevOps or backend engineering with production ownership

Projects that prove the role

  • Service level objective framework adopted across five product teams
  • On-call noise reduction programme that halved paging volume
  • Multi-region failover exercise with documented recovery objectives

Evidence to collect

  • A written post-mortem you led, including follow-up actions you tracked to completion
  • Before/after pager volume or MTTR numbers
  • An SLO dashboard you can walk through

What the interview covers

  • Defining an SLO for a service with no historical data
  • Walking through a real incident, what you saw and what you changed
  • Eliminating a source of toil without hiding necessary work
  • Capacity planning ahead of a known demand event

How the role progresses

  • Systems Administrator
  • DevOps Engineer
  • Site Reliability Engineer
  • Staff SRE
  • Director of Reliability

Certifications that carry weight

  • Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
  • HashiCorp Certified Terraform Associate
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional

Related roles

  • cloud-devops-engineer
  • cybersecurity-analyst
  • software-engineer

Turn this into a plan

Inside CareerDev4AI, choosing this role generates a roadmap of the skills, projects and milestones that move you towards it.

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