Roles and responsibilities for a site reliability engineer

[Jack prabha]

Implementing an SRE team will greatly benefit both IT operations and software development teams. Not only can SRE drive deeper reliability to systems in production but it will likely help IT, support and development teams spend less time working on support escalations, and give them more time to build new features and services.

So, let’s quickly go over common site reliability engineering roles and responsibilities you can expect to see.

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Building software to help operations and support teams
SRE teams are in charge of proactively building and implementing services to make IT and support better at their jobs. This can be anything from adjustments to monitoring and alerting to code changes in production. A site reliability engineer can be tasked with building a homegrown tool from scratch to help with weaknesses in software delivery or incident management.

Fixing support escalation issues
Similarly to the point above, a site reliability engineer can expect to spend time fixing support escalation cases. But, as your SRE operations mature, your systems will become more reliable and you’ll see fewer critical incidents in production – leading to fewer support escalations. Because an SRE team touches so many different parts of the engineering and IT organization, they can be a great source of knowledge and can be helpful for routing issues to the right people and teams.

Optimizing on-call rotations and processes
More times than not, site reliability engineers will need to take on-call responsibilities. At most organizations, the SRE role will have a lot of say in how the team can improve system reliability through the optimization of on-call processes. SRE teams will help add automation and context to alerts – leading to better real-time collaborative response from on-call responders. Additionally, site reliability engineers can update runbooks, tools and documentation to help prepare on-call teams for future incidents.