Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
Ensure systems are reliable, scalable and performant. The bridge between development and operations.
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
Site Reliability Engineers bring a software engineering mindset to infrastructure operations. Born at Google, the SRE practice has been widely adopted across the tech industry. SREs focus on system reliability, performance, and scalability through automation, monitoring, and incident management. With companies increasingly relying on complex distributed systems, SREs who can maintain high availability while enabling rapid development are invaluable.
Skills
LinkedIn Optimization
- 1
Share postmortem insights (anonymized) and lessons learned
- 2
Post about SLO/SLI frameworks and reliability practices
- 3
Highlight uptime achievements and incident response metrics
- 4
Connect with SRE leads at target companies
- 5
Contribute to SRE community resources
CV & Resume
- 1
Quantify: "Improved service availability from 99.9% to 99.99%"
- 2
Detail incident response experience and MTTR improvements
- 3
Show automation that reduced toil
- 4
Include on-call experience and escalation procedures
- 5
Highlight observability stack experience
Outreach Strategy
- 1
Research their status page and recent incidents
- 2
Share insights on improving reliability at their scale
- 3
Mention experience with their tech stack
- 4
Connect with SRE team members
- 5
Demonstrate understanding of their reliability challenges
Interview Prep
- 1
Prepare production incident stories with resolution steps
- 2
Review SLO/SLI concepts and error budgets
- 3
Practice system design with reliability focus
- 4
Show debugging methodology for distributed systems
A day as Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
Check system health dashboards, review SLO burn rates, work on automation to reduce toil, participate in incident response, conduct chaos engineering experiments, collaborate with development teams on reliability improvements.
Career Path
Common mistakes
Not showing reliability metrics improvements
Focusing only on firefighting without prevention
Not mentioning SLO/SLI experience
Ignoring automation and toil reduction
Not preparing incident response scenarios for interviews
Essential tools
FAQ
Average salary for a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)?
The average salary for a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) in Europe ranges between 65K - 120K EUR. This varies by experience, location, and company type.
Key skills for a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)?
Main technical skills: Observability, Incident Management, Automation, SLOs/SLIs, Chaos Engineering. Soft skills like communication and teamwork are equally important.
Career path for a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)?
Typical path: Junior SRE > Site Reliability Engineer > Senior SRE > Staff SRE > SRE Manager > Director of SRE > VP of Infrastructure.