Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
Owns whether the thing stays up, measured rather than argued: service objectives, error budgets, the on-call rotation, and the blameless post-mortem after it does not.
Who to hire
The shape of person who does this job well — and whether you should be hiring it at all yet.
Google's invention, and the discipline it named is the useful part: decide what level of reliability the service actually needs, express it as a number, and spend the difference between that number and perfection on shipping features instead. The seat is distinct from DevOps even though the skills overlap — DevOps is about the path to production, SRE is about what happens once something is there and someone is relying on it. Hire when downtime has a price: a customer contract with an uptime clause, a revenue path that stops when the service does, or an on-call rotation that is quietly burning out the engineers taking it.
Education
No requirement. The field is full of people who arrived from systems administration or backend engineering; what matters is whether they think in numbers rather than in adjectives.
Experience
5+ years running production systems, with on-call carried personally. Ask for a post-mortem they wrote — the good ones read as engineering documents rather than as apologies, and they name the system that failed rather than the person who touched it.
Vertical / domain experience
Scale and consequence rather than industry. Running a service with ten customers and one with ten million are different jobs, and a regulated uptime obligation — payments, health, telecom — turns reliability work into evidence work.
What it pays, roughly
$95,992 median, Canada — for Computer and information systems professionals, the closest occupation Statistics Canada actually measures, measured from $85,010 to $103,002 over 202,605 people. That occupation is broader than this role, so read it as an anchor, not a salary band — and note that a startup usually pays below it in cash and above it in equity.
Credentials and certifications
What exists, who issues it, and whether it means anything for this seat. A credential is evidence of a floor, never of judgment — and in a few of these roles it is a legal requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
| Credential | Issued by | When it matters | Skiploma |
|---|---|---|---|
| A note on the word “engineer” in Canada | Engineers Canada and the twelve provincial and territorial regulators | In a joint statement of July 2022 the regulators restated that “software engineer”, “computer engineer” and related IT titles prefixed with engineer may not be used by anyone not licensed as an engineer — in job titles, postings, résumés, websites or social media. APEGA obtained a court injunction against unlicensed use in 2019 and later pursued a software company over its postings. Alberta tabled Bill 7 in November 2023 proposing an exemption for the title; whether it is in force is not established here, so check your own province before writing it on a posting. This is why Canadian job ads so often say Developer. | — |
| Google's Site Reliability Engineering books | Not a credential — the source texts for the discipline, free to read. Someone who talks about SLOs and error budgets without having read them usually means uptime monitoring. | — | |
| CKA / CKAD — Kubernetes administrator and application developer | Cloud Native Computing Foundation / Linux Foundation | Hands-on and examined under time pressure; directly relevant where the platform is Kubernetes. | Study |
| Cloud platform professional certifications | AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure | Expected breadth. Shipped, surviving systems outrank it. | — |
What this role does at each stage
The same title means three different jobs depending on how much money is in the bank. Read the stage you are at, then read the next one — that is what you are hiring toward.
Nobody. Uptime is the founder being paged by a customer, which is fast feedback and entirely sufficient.
Part of the DevOps or backend seat. Install the two cheap things now: alerting that distinguishes a real outage from noise, and a written runbook for the three failures you can already predict.
A seat once uptime is contractual, or once on-call is spread across enough people to need a rotation, a handover and a policy on what is worth waking someone for.
Can one person hold this and something else?
The whole point of the many-hats problem: which of these jobs merge safely into one person, and which merges quietly cost you money or control.
Merges well with
- DevOps Engineer / DevOps Specialist
- Backend Engineer / Back-End Developer
- IT Systems Administrator / Sysadmin
- Chief Technology Officer (Founders & fractional leadership)
SRE and DevOps are one person in nearly every company under about thirty engineers, and splitting them earlier than that produces two half-staffed functions. Where they do separate, the clean line is: DevOps owns the pipeline into production, SRE owns the service once it is there.
Keep separate from
Reliability work loses to feature work whenever the same person owns both and a deadline appears. If the roadmap and the error budget sit in one pair of hands, the budget is the one that gets spent.
Reading a candidate
What good looks like in an hour, and what should stop the process.
Good signals
- Talks in service objectives and error budgets, with numbers
- Has written a post-mortem that blames a system rather than a person
- Knows what should not page a human at 3am
Red flags
- Chases 100% uptime as a goal
- On-call with no compensation or rotation policy
- Monitoring that only answers "is it up"
The same role in three kinds of company
This job changes shape depending on who is paying for it. An agency sells the hours, a contract shop delivers into someone else's estate, and a product company is building something it keeps — and the same title means something different in each.
In an agency
Rare in an agency, and when a client asks for an uptime guarantee, read it closely: agreeing to an SLA you cannot measure is a contractual liability dressed up as a selling point.
On a client contract
On contract, reliability obligations usually sit with whoever operates the system after handover. Say in the statement of work who that is, because the client will assume it is you.
In a product company
This is where SRE belongs. The discipline pays for itself the moment an outage costs more than the engineering time spent preventing it — and the error budget is what stops reliability work from eating the roadmap.
What this role runs on
The software categories this job lives in. Each links to our buying brief and to the research behind it.
| Category | Who the default is | What leaving costs | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CNAPP & Cloud Security Posture Management | Wiz, now inside Google | Agentless scanning needs cloud-account trust relationships, and those are granted once and rarely re-granted | The research → |
| Workflow Automation — BPA, iPaaS & RPA | Microsoft Power Automate across the board; by segment, UiPath (RPA), ServiceNow (enterprise workflow), Workato / Boomi / MuleSoft (iPaaS) and Zapier… | Hundreds of live automations wired into production systems, each with its own credentials, connectors and edge-case logic | The research → |
| Project Management Software | Microsoft, Atlassian, Asana, Monday | The weakest in this research | The research → |
| Knowledge Management & Enterprise Search | Glean and Notion | — | The research → |