Select your current position
Pick a role and level — we'll show the growth path, skills and gap analysis.
Development path
Junior
0-2 years
Responsibility: Monitoring SLI/SLO. Participating in on-call rotation. Writing runbooks. Automating routine operations. Incident analysis.
Key skills:
Middle
2-5 years
Responsibility: Defining SLI/SLO/SLA. Designing monitoring. Capacity planning. Automating incident response. Post-mortem analysis.
Key skills:
Senior
5-8 years
Responsibility: Designing highly available systems. Chaos engineering. Performance engineering. Error budgets. Coordination with development.
Key skills:
Lead / Staff
7-12 years
Responsibility: SRE strategy. Reliability culture. SLO standards. Incident management processes. Coordination with product.
Key skills:
Principal
10+ years
Responsibility: Enterprise reliability strategy. Multi-region architecture. SRE culture at scale. Industry best practices.
Key skills:
Gap analysis: skills to develop
To reach the next level you'll need to develop:
Configures APM instrumentation across microservices for production monitoring. Creates dashboards tracking golden signals and SLI compliance. Participates in on-call rotation using APM data to triage and resolve incidents.
Independently configures ArgoCD for reliable service deployments with health checks, sync windows, and automated rollback on SLO violations. Writes ApplicationSets for consistent infrastructure deployment across reliability zones and regions. Implements ArgoCD monitoring with Prometheus metrics, alerting on sync failures, and integration with incident management workflows.
Conducts capacity planning for services: trend analysis, growth prediction, resource right-sizing. Configures HPA/VPA. Creates capacity dashboards. Plans seasonal load changes.
Conducts chaos experiments for SLO validation: creates hypothesis-driven experiments with clear steady-state metrics, uses Chaos Mesh/Litmus for Kubernetes failures. Analyzes impact on SLIs and determines remediation actions based on findings.
Configures Continuous Profiling for services. Creates dashboards and alerts. Participates in on-call rotation. Analyzes incidents.
Implements DR solutions: automated backups, cross-region replication, failover testing. Documents DR plans. Configures backup monitoring and alerting on backup failures.
Configures ELK pipeline: Filebeat/Fluentbit for collection, Logstash for parsing and enrichment, index patterns in Elasticsearch. Creates Kibana dashboards for operational monitoring.
Applies GitOps for SRE tasks: configures monitoring and alerting through GitOps (Prometheus rules as code), manages SLO definitions in Git, implements emergency procedures through Git-based runbooks. Ensures observability for GitOps sync status.
Configures Loki for multi-tenant log aggregation across services. Creates advanced LogQL queries with metric extraction for SLI tracking. Builds alerting rules on log patterns and participates in on-call rotation using log-based diagnostics.
Creates Helm charts for SRE tools: custom exporters, alerting rules, dashboards-as-code. Manages dependencies and chart repositories. Configures environments through value overrides.
Maintains high-load systems: autoscaling policies, connection pool tuning, cache optimization. Conducts load testing (k6, Locust). Diagnoses bottlenecks through profiling.
Configures Jaeger / Grafana Tempo for services. Creates dashboards and alerts. Participates in on-call rotation. Analyzes incidents.
Administers Kubernetes: RBAC, network policies, resource quotas. Configures HPA/VPA for autoscaling. Diagnoses complex issues: CrashLoopBackOff, evictions, networking issues.
Diagnoses latency issues: distributed tracing for bottleneck detection, flame graphs for CPU profiling, connection pool analysis. Optimizes: caching, connection reuse, async processing.
Independently implements tasks with Python Web Frameworks in Kubernetes/Terraform. Understands internals and optimizes performance. Writes tests using chaos engineering.
Manages Vault: configures secret engines (KV, database, PKI), auth methods (K8s, OIDC). Rotates secrets. Integrates Vault with CI/CD and Kubernetes (CSI driver, injector).
Manages VPN infrastructure: IPSec tunnels, WireGuard for internal connectivity, split tunneling. Monitors tunnel health and latency. Configures failover between VPN endpoints.
Manages load balancers: target groups, weighted routing, TLS termination. Configures advanced health checks. Implements canary deployments through traffic shifting. Diagnoses 502/503 errors.
Designs custom metrics: SLI metrics for SLO tracking, detailed latency histograms, business metrics. Configures recording rules for aggregation. Creates alerting on custom metrics.
Manages incidents: severity classification, stakeholder communication, cross-team coordination. Conducts root cause analysis. Leads post-mortems with actionable follow-ups.
Manages on-call process: configures PagerDuty schedules and escalation policies, writes runbooks for typical alerts. Analyzes on-call burden: toil, alert quality, false positive rate.