Hiring site reliability engineers

Your guide to finding and hiring the right person for your organization

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Job description

How to write a site reliability engineer job description

Attracting a well-qualified site reliability engineer (SRE) to your organization requires an effective job description. Think about the ideal candidate and write down their attributes and experience. Next, compile lists of the objectives, responsibilities, and qualifications for the role. Keep the lists brief and concise, and include a summary at the beginning of the job description that conveys what it’s like to work for your company.

Site reliability engineer job description template

This sample job post will introduce your organization’s culture and values, while helping potential candidates understand how they’ll contribute from Day 1.

Sample site reliability engineer job description

At [Company X], we’re passionate about building software that solves problems. We count on our site reliability engineers (SREs) to empower users with a rich feature set, high availability, and stellar performance level to pursue their missions. As we expand customer deployments, we’re seeking an experienced SRE to deliver insights from massive-scale data in real time. Specifically, we’re searching for someone who has fresh ideas and a unique viewpoint, and who enjoys collaborating with a cross-functional team to develop real-world solutions and positive user experiences for every interaction.

Objectives of this role

Run the production environment by monitoring availability and taking a holistic view of system health
Build software and systems to manage platform infrastructure and applications
Improve reliability, quality, and time-to-market of our suite of software solutions
Measure and optimize system performance, with an eye toward pushing our capabilities forward, getting ahead of customer needs, and innovating for continual improvement
Provide primary operational support and engineering for multiple large-scale distributed software applications

Responsibilities

Gather and analyze metrics from operating systems as well as applications to assist in performance tuning and fault finding
Partner with development teams to improve services through rigorous testing and release procedures
Participate in system design consulting, platform management, and capacity planning
Create sustainable systems and services through automation and uplifts
Balance feature development speed and reliability with well-defined service-level objectives

Required skills and qualifications

Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent) in computer science or related discipline
Ability to program (structured and OOP) using one or more high-level languages, such as Python, Java, C/C++, Ruby, and JavaScript
Experience with distributed storage technologies such as NFS, HDFS, Ceph, and Amazon S3, as well as dynamic resource management frameworks (Apache Mesos, Kubernetes, Yarn)
Proactive approach to identifying problems, performance bottlenecks, and areas for improvement