Software Engineering · Mid level · Updated July 2026

    Site Reliability Engineer Resume Example

    SRE is reliability as an engineering discipline, so your resume should be measured in the language of reliability: SLOs, error budgets, availability, and recovery time. A reviewer wants proof you keep systems up and automate the work of doing so. The example below leads with those numbers.

    What separates an SRE resume from a DevOps one

    The two roles overlap, and many SRE resumes read like DevOps ones, which is a missed opportunity. DevOps is judged on delivery; SRE is judged on reliability. A DevOps bullet might be "rebuilt CI/CD and cut deploy time 60%"; this example opens with "defined SLOs across 20 services and raised availability to 99.95%." Same toolbox, different headline.

    So speak in reliability metrics: availability (the nines), mean time to recovery, SLO attainment, incident counts, and toil eliminated. "Improved reliability" is empty; those numbers are exactly what a reviewer is scanning for. And prove you automate, not just operate. The "engineer" in SRE means coding away toil, so quantify what you removed the way the example's failover bullet does (~15 hours/week of toil gone). That shows you scale reliability with software, not headcount.

    Lead with reliability outcomes (SLOs, MTTR)

    An SRE resume lives or dies on whether it shows the incident lifecycle in numbers: detection, response, and prevention.

    Do

    • Quantify availability, MTTR, and SLO attainment
    • Show toil removed in hours/week or steps eliminated
    • Cover detection, on-call response, and prevention
    • Tie post-incident work to fewer repeat incidents

    Don't

    • Frame the whole resume as deploys and pipelines
    • Say 'kept systems stable' with no number
    • List observability tools with no outcome
    • Leave out on-call and incident ownership

    Carrying a pager and improving the system around it is the heart of the role, so make it visible rather than implied.

    Signals that read as senior SRE

    A senior SRE resume reads as systemic, not reactive: error budgets that shaped release decisions, a reliability standard other teams adopted, capacity work that headed off an outage before it happened. That's the same scope-and-judgment bar the senior software engineer example is organized around, spoken in reliability's dialect. Back the story with a scannable skills list:

    • Reliability: SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident response, on-call
    • Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, tracing, alerting
    • Platform: Kubernetes, Terraform, containers, a cloud provider
    • Coding: Go, Python (automation, tooling)
    • Practices: capacity planning, chaos/load testing, post-incident reviews

    Then mirror the environment the posting names and lead with the tools you know best. If your background is more deployment- and CI/CD-focused than reliability-focused, a DevOps framing of the same experience may fit that particular job better; the DevOps engineer example shows that version of the page.

    Frequently asked questions

    What's the difference between an SRE and a DevOps resume?

    Both touch automation and infrastructure, but an SRE resume centers on reliability (SLOs, error budgets, incident response, availability) while DevOps leans toward CI/CD and delivery. Frame yours toward the role you're applying for.

    How much coding should an SRE resume show?

    Enough to prove you automate with software: tooling, automation, and infrastructure code in Go or Python. SRE is an engineering role; coding ability matters alongside operations.

    Do I need on-call experience?

    It helps a lot. Incident response and on-call are core to SRE. If you've owned on-call, runbooks, or post-incident reviews, feature them prominently; they're among the strongest signals for the role.

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    Tom Becker — site reliability engineer resume example

    Denver, CO

    Summary

    Site reliability engineer with 7 years keeping high-traffic systems fast and available. I work in SLOs and error budgets, automate the toil away, and lead incident response when things break.

    Work Experience

    Site Reliability Engineer · Apex Streaming

    2021 – Present · Denver, CO

    • Defined SLOs and error budgets across 20 services and held teams to them, raising availability to 99.95% over two quarters.
    • Cut mean time to recovery 45% by rewriting noisy alerts to be symptom-based, adding distributed tracing, and tightening runbooks.
    • Automated capacity planning and regional failover, removing ~15 hours/week of toil and turning game-day failovers into a non-event.

    DevOps / Reliability Engineer · Granite Systems

    2019 – 2021 · Denver, CO

    • Built the Prometheus + Grafana observability stack (metrics, dashboards, and alerting), adopted org-wide as the default.
    • Established blameless post-incident reviews and tracked action items to done, driving a 30% drop in repeat incidents over a year.
    • Migrated click-ops infrastructure to Terraform, codifying 200+ cloud resources and making environments reproducible and reviewable.

    Linux Systems Administrator · Halcyon Networks

    2018 – 2019 · Denver, CO

    • Kept a fleet of Linux servers and the on-call alerting for a 24/7 streaming platform above its uptime SLA.
    • Automated server provisioning and config with Ansible, cutting new-host setup from two days of manual steps to under an hour.

    Projects

    slo-dashboard — Grafana SLO toolkit · Go, Prometheus

    • Open-source tool that generates SLO and error-budget Grafana dashboards from a short YAML spec, with no clicking through the UI.
    • Adopted across several teams to standardize reliability reporting; ships with sensible burn-rate alerts out of the box.

    Education

    B.S. Computer Science · Colorado School of Mines

    2014 – 2018 · Golden, CO

    Certifications

    Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) · Cloud Native Computing Foundation

    2023

    AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate · Amazon Web Services

    2021

    Languages

    • English · Native
    • German · Professional

    Skills

    • Reliability: SLOs/SLIs, Incident response, Observability, Prometheus/Grafana
    • Platform: Kubernetes, Terraform, Go, Python, AWS
    • Practices: On-call, Capacity planning, Chaos testing, CI/CD