Hey everyone! I'm reaching out for some advice because I've received two job offers at the same company for positions as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) and a Release Engineer. Initially, I interviewed for a Platform Engineering role, but that one has closed. My background is mostly in smaller companies where I've taken on various DevOps responsibilities, and I've recently been in a dedicated DevOps position that's really more of a catch-all developer role. I'm looking to focus on what I enjoy within DevOps, which is designing and implementing distributed, scalable infrastructure, and I want to avoid turning into a Sys Admin or losing touch with software engineering in my daily work. I thought Platform Engineering would be a great fit for that, but now I'm considering these two other roles. I know each company has its own take on these positions, and since I don't have many contacts in my network for guidance, I'd really appreciate any insights you might have! Also, I have a bit of an instinctive hesitation towards Release Engineering because I'm worried that focusing heavily on Git, release versioning, and build tools would bore me, though I'd love to be challenged on that thought since I do enjoy collaboration.
1 Answer
If you love designing scalable infrastructure and want to steer clear of sys admin responsibilities, SRE might be the way to go for you. Generally, Release Engineering can be more focused on versioning and build tools, whereas SRE often involves more infrastructure-related work, which seems to align with your interests quite well.
SREs definitely aren't just about cloud architecture. You're missing out on understanding the role’s full dynamics and its focus on reliability!
Thanks a ton for your perspective!
This is a bit of a misconception about SRE. The role mainly focuses on application reliability, monitoring, and observability, which includes incident management and application architecture. While infrastructure design is a piece of it, the core responsibilities lean more towards ensuring apps are reliable.