Is it realistic for a company to have only one Site Reliability Engineer? Before choosing this career path, I want to understand whether a solo SRE would be expected to handle on-call duties every day. That sounds potentially unsustainable, so I'm wondering whether companies usually create an on-call rotation that includes other engineers or developers. How many SREs are typically on your team, and how often are you expected to be on call?
4 Answers
Yes, a company can have only one SRE—or even no dedicated SREs. The title doesn’t determine the on-call setup. Other experienced developers or operations staff can share the rotation, depending on the company and its systems.
I’ve seen teams with five SREs using week-long rotations, while some companies expect a solo infrastructure engineer to be available constantly. I personally wouldn’t accept a role that requires on-call more often than about once a month. Make sure the schedule, escalation policy, response expectations, and compensation are clearly defined before accepting.
Solo SRE roles can work when the systems are automated, redundant, well documented, and designed not to require overnight intervention. Some people have stayed on call continuously for years with very few incidents, while larger teams can still have terrible schedules if the service is unreliable. Ask how often the pager goes off, who covers vacations, and whether the company has a plan to reduce its dependence on one person.
Being the only SRE doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be paged every night. At one small company, I was the only person who understood the infrastructure, but I made it clear that I wasn’t formally on call. The system was reliable enough that I was contacted only once in several years. The real issue is the product’s reliability and traffic, not just the number of SREs.
Exactly. On-call can be almost effortless for a stable, well-designed service or completely exhausting for a fragile system with frequent incidents.