What is a Site Reliability Engineer?
A Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) applies software engineering principles to operations problems — their goal is to make production systems more reliable, scalable, and efficient. SREs own uptime, latency SLOs, incident response, and the tooling that gives engineering teams observability into their systems. Unlike a traditional ops role, SREs write code to solve operational problems: automation, self-healing systems, and infrastructure as code.
At what stage should you hire an SRE?
Series B and beyond, once production reliability has become a material concern — when incidents are causing customer impact, when uptime SLAs matter for enterprise deals, or when the on-call burden on product engineers is hurting retention and morale. Pre-Series B, a strong DevOps engineer or platform engineer handles most of this scope.
Common titles for this role
- Site Reliability Engineer
- SRE
- Production Engineer
- Reliability Engineer
- Infrastructure Engineer (reliability-focused)
- Platform Engineer (reliability-focused)
What does an SRE do at a startup?
- Define and monitor service level objectives (SLOs) and error budgets
- Own the incident response process: detection, escalation, mitigation, and postmortems
- Build and maintain observability infrastructure: metrics, logging, tracing (Datadog, Grafana, OpenTelemetry)
- Automate operational toil: runbooks converted to code, manual deployments automated
- Improve system reliability: identify single points of failure and design for redundancy
- Capacity planning: model traffic growth and ensure infrastructure scales ahead of demand
- Partner with product engineers on reliability best practices and production readiness reviews
Key skills and qualifications
- Strong software engineering background — SRE is a software engineering role applied to operations
- Deep knowledge of distributed systems: failure modes, CAP theorem, consistency vs. availability tradeoffs
- Observability expertise: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or similar
- Cloud platform expertise: AWS, GCP, or Azure; Kubernetes orchestration
- Incident management experience: has run postmortems, improved MTTR, reduced MTTD
- Strong coding skills: Python, Go, or Bash for automation and tooling
Why hire your SRE through RFS?
- SRE requires both engineering depth and operational instincts — we screen for both sides of that equation
- 29-day average time to hire — SRE is a competitive, specialized search; our network reaches the right candidates
- 300+ placements at VC-backed companies across infrastructure and engineering functions
- Pre-vetted for production operations experience at scale
- No upfront fees
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