Site Reliability Engineer

Working Schedule
 
SRE is a well-compensated career field, so expect to earn those salaries by putting in full-time hours! As ParkMyCloud explains it, site reliability essentially equates to business availability. In other words, it’s up to Site Reliability Engineers to minimize costly downtime. That can translate into working after-hours or being on-call to respond rapidly to issues. 

Typical Duties

• Creating or improving software related to operations and support
• Optimizing and automating processes
• Ensuring release engineering consistency practices
• Addressing and minimizing support escalation 
• Capturing and documenting newly-learned information for later reference, such as by creating runbooks. Preventing “siloing” or hoarding of sharable knowledge
• Troubleshooting issues
• Conducting incident reviews (also known as postmortems, retrospectives, or root cause analysis) to determine why a problem occurred without placing blame 

Additional Responsibilities

• Working on-call for troubleshooting and other incident response issues
• Ensuring compliance with organizational protocols 
• Creating action item lists to address problems and mitigate future similar issues within the Software Development Life Cycle

Soft Skills
 

• Ability to facilitate collaboration between teams
• Analytical problem-solving
• Attention to detail
• Customer service 
• Empathy
• Flexibility
• Goal-focused
• Highly organized; good time management skills
• Investigative and inquisitive
• Leadership and management skills
• Objectivity
• Process-oriented
• Quality assurance mindset
• Strong communications skills

Technical Skills
 
SREs are required to have several skill sets related to the following:

• Build automation tools
• Build configuration languages
• Compilers
• Databases
• Distributed systems design
• Domain knowledge related to system administration, development, configuration management, integration testing
• General source code management
• Installers
• Networking
• Operating systems
• Package managers
• Security
• Software engineering

• Computer systems design agencies
• Corporations/companies
• Governmental/Military agencies
• Healthcare 
• Higher education institutions
• Media and entertainment

If an organization has a site or sites that are so important they need a Site Reliability Engineer, then expectations are going to run high. According to Netguru, the four main reasons to hire an SRE are to minimize downtime, anticipate and mitigate risks, achieve faster development, and to save money through those and other implemented processes. Clearly Site Reliability Engineers have their hands full, and while they’re trying to juggle the workload they must also keep ahead of changes to the IT world. 
 
Hours can get long when problems occur, not to mention on-all rotations...which means even when you’re off, you’re still technically on. Incident response times can be short, and every employer is different when it comes to compensating for work done after hours. Some may grant Paid Time Off, some might give extra pay, and some might offer a hearty “thanks very much” and nothing else. 

SRE is still a relatively new concept for many growing organizations. As a result, one trend is that businesses are still trying to figure out how to best manage it. A major factor driving the push for Site Reliability Engineering is incident resolution, suggesting the notion that companies are simply getting tired of putting out fires and want to get a better handle of them. 
 
Of course, this relieves stress from the management by putting the stress instead onto the SREs. This, in turn, can require employers to find ways to keep those stressed-out workers healthy and well, so the workforce can operate at peak efficiency. Some companies do this better than others, but the trend is to recognize the value of taking care of busy workers who are taking care of business!

The name “Site Reliability Engineer” gives us a few clues about the type of people who work in this field. They enjoy working on websites, an interest most SREs developed in their youth. They’re responsible for ensuring sites are “reliable,” meaning everything works how it should when it should. Thus workers themselves should be reliable, which is another characteristic often honed in one’s early years. 
 
Such persons like to be punctual and prepared and likely did well academically. Indeed, to be an engineer of any type usually requires strong academic aptitudes, particularly in math and science, of course. One of the interesting things about this field, though, is how many soft skills come into play. 
 
An SRE needs to be a people person, someone comfortable working with teams, and able to foster collaboration between those teams. As a result, they may have held leadership positions in school, or perhaps simply had a lot of siblings to contend with! SREs are efficiency experts, trained to find ways to make things better by studying problems and determining solutions based on their research. This requires a creative yet analytical mindset as if both hemispheres of the brain are working in tandem. It’s possible many SREs are ambidextrous or adept at playing musical instruments.