Site Reliability Engineer Job Description Template (Free, 2026)

Job Title: Site Reliability Engineer [Mid-Level / Senior / Staff] Department: Engineering / Infrastructure Location: [City, State] / Remote / Hybrid Reports To: Engineering Manager / VP Engineering Employment Type: Full-Time About [Company Name] [Company Name] is a [stage/sector] company operating [product] at [scale — e.g., X requests/day, X TB/day]. We run on [AWS / GCP / Azure] and take reliability seriously — our engineering teams own their SLOs and operate with full production accountability. We're looking for engineers who make systems more reliable through software, not just process. About the Role As a Site Reliability Engineer, you will partner with product engineering teams to define SLOs, build observability infrastructure, automate operational toil, and respond to production incidents. You will spend at least 50% of your time on engineering work — building tooling, improving the deployment pipeline, and designing for failure modes — not firefighting. This is a high-trust, high-impact role where your decisions directly influence the reliability of systems used by [X] customers. Key Responsibilities • Define, measure, and enforce SLOs and error budgets across critical services with product engineering teams • Build and maintain observability infrastructure: metrics, logging, tracing (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Jaeger) • Develop and operate deployment automation, canary analysis, and progressive delivery pipelines • Lead incident response: on-call rotation, incident command, blameless post-mortem facilitation • Identify and eliminate operational toil through automation using Python, Go, or shell scripting • Design capacity planning models and run load/stress tests to forecast infrastructure needs • Implement and improve disaster recovery procedures, runbooks, and chaos engineering practices • Collaborate with development teams to embed reliability patterns (circuit breakers, retries, graceful degradation) • Evaluate and introduce new infrastructure tooling; contribute to the platform engineering roadmap • Mentor engineers in reliability engineering practices and help grow SRE culture across the org Required Qualifications • [3]+ years in a site reliability, platform, or infrastructure engineering role • Proficiency in at least one systems programming language: Python, Go, or similar • Strong understanding of distributed systems, networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/2), and cloud-native architectures • Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and container orchestration at production scale • Experience designing and operating observability stacks (Prometheus/Alertmanager, Grafana, ELK/Loki, or equivalent) • Solid understanding of SLO/SLI/SLA concepts and error budget management • Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Pulumi, CDK) Nice to Have • Contributions to open-source reliability or infrastructure projects • Chaos engineering experience (Chaos Monkey, Gremlin, LitmusChaos) • Service mesh experience (Istio, Linkerd, Envoy) • Experience with eBPF-based tooling for performance profiling What We Offer • Competitive salary: $[low]–$[high]/year (see benchmarks below) • Equity: [X]% stock options / RSUs • Health, dental, and vision insurance (100% employer-paid for employee) • Flexible PTO + [X] company-wide holidays • On-call compensation: [cash / TOIL policy] • Remote-friendly / home office stipend of $[X] • Learning & development budget: $[X]/year • [Additional perk — conference attendance, wellness stipend, etc.] Salary Range: $120,000–$210,000/year (US, 2026 benchmark; exact offer commensurate with experience) [Company Name] is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.