Site Reliability Engineers, or SREs, are primarily responsible for how code is managed within an organization’s IT infrastructure. It’s their job to monitor, configure, and deploy new code, as well as handle change management and emergency response for services in production.

As software engineers with experience in IT operations, SREs develop automated processes to handle operational tasks like creating test environments, analyzing logs, and on-call responses to errors and other issues.

This job role will typically involve working across different teams - typically development and operations - to provide support and deliver reliable systems to both of those teams. This is a key part of the development ecosystem, as it allows for both development and operations to focus on building new features while SREs ensure the right infrastructure is in place to keep downtime and errors at a minimum.

Ideally, Site Reliability Engineers will split their time between project work and operations tasks. According to Google, SREs should be monitored to ensure they spend no more than 50% of their available time on operations, otherwise, tasks like implementing automated processes, creating new features, and scaling the system will not be completed.

SREs are also responsible for handling incidents with infrastructure and, depending on the employer, may be required to be part of an on-call rotation outside of typical office hours. Incident management for SREs will typically involve an evaluation of the incident after it has been resolved to determine whether any new automated processes, documentation, or other tools need to be built or updated to prevent the incident from happening again.

Similarly, SREs will typically be expected to continuously update documentation and/or rulebooks to ensure that their knowledge is communicated across the organization.