The Systems Engineering Side of Site Reliability Engineering

In order to run the company’s numerous services as efficiently and reliably as possible, Google’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) organization leverages the expertise of two main disciplines: Software Engineering and Systems Engineering. The roles of Software Engineer (SWE) and Systems Engineer (SE) lie at the two poles of the SRE continuum of skills and interests. While Site Reliability Engineers tend to be assigned to one of these two buckets, there is much overlap between the two job roles, and the knowledge exchange between the two job roles is rather fluid.