Can a company have just one SRE, and what happens with on-call?

I’ve seen both extremes: a solo engineer who was effectively on call all year but almost never got paged, and a larger team where people were contacted constantly. The number of SREs alone doesn’t determine quality of life. Strong automation, redundancy, monitoring, documentation, and a culture of fixing recurring alerts matter more. Make sure management is willing to invest in those things and provide real backup coverage.

Yes, a company can have only one SRE—or even no dedicated SREs, with developers sharing infrastructure responsibilities. Having one SRE doesn’t automatically mean that person must be on call 24/7. The actual workload depends heavily on the product, reliability of the systems, alert quality, and how often incidents happen.

A single-person SRE team is common in smaller companies, but permanent 24/7 responsibility is a serious operational risk. Some solo SREs are technically always designated as the contact, yet rarely receive calls because the systems are stable. Before accepting the role, ask about incident frequency, expected response times, backup coverage, vacation arrangements, and whether you’ll be expected to answer alerts outside working hours.

On-call doesn’t have to be limited to SREs. A rotation can include experienced developers or other engineers who understand the application, with the SRE acting as an escalation point. Teams with several people often rotate weekly or less frequently, but the schedule should be agreed on clearly rather than assumed.