Hire Site Reliability Engineers (SRE)

A Site Reliability Engineer applies software engineering discipline to infrastructure and operations problems. They write code to automate operational tasks, design systems to be observable and recoverable, define and enforce reliability targets (SLOs), build the tooling that detects problems before users notice them, and lead the response when incidents occur. The key distinction from a traditional sysadmin is that SREs solve operational problems with code rather than manual processes.

Standard start time is 48 hours from contract signing for general SRE engagements. For SREs with specific platform expertise - GKE, EKS, specific monitoring stacks, or regulated-industry compliance requirements - one week is a more realistic matching timeline. We assess your current stack during the scoping call to ensure the right match.

A Service Level Objective is a reliability target expressed as a measurable metric - for example, 99.9% of API requests must complete in under 500ms over a 30-day rolling window. Defining SLOs provides a shared language between engineering and business stakeholders about what "good enough" reliability means, creates an error budget that quantifies how much downtime is acceptable, and enables engineering teams to make explicit tradeoffs between reliability investment and feature delivery. Without SLOs, reliability work is often either ignored or unlimited in scope.

DevOps is a philosophy and set of practices for improving collaboration between development and operations teams - continuous integration, continuous delivery, infrastructure automation, and cultural change. SRE is a specific implementation of DevOps principles with Google's particular emphasis on using software engineering to manage operations. In practice, "SRE" typically implies deeper reliability engineering expertise - SLOs, error budgets, chaos engineering, and production ownership - while "DevOps engineer" often focuses on CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration, and deployment automation.

For active production incidents at existing clients, our SREs are available immediately. For new client engagements starting with an active incident, contact us directly - we will assess whether we can provide meaningful help within your timescale and what information we need to onboard quickly. Standard placement timelines do not apply to emergency incident response.

We follow the three pillars: logs, metrics, and traces. We instrument services with OpenTelemetry for vendor-agnostic telemetry, aggregate metrics in Prometheus with Grafana dashboards, configure distributed tracing to follow requests across service boundaries, and set up structured logging with correlation IDs. Critically, we build alerting on symptoms (error rate, latency percentiles, saturation) rather than causes (CPU usage, memory) - symptoms page on things that affect users, causes create alert fatigue.

Chaos engineering involves deliberately injecting failures into a system to validate that it handles them correctly. The goal is to surface hidden assumptions about reliability before real failures expose them in production. You need chaos engineering when your system has distributed components with complex failure modes, when you have not validated your recovery procedures recently, or when you are preparing for a major traffic event. We design experiments that are controlled, observable, and incrementally riskier - starting with isolated components in staging before moving to production.

We design sustainable on-call rotations with clear escalation paths, well-maintained runbooks for common failure modes, PagerDuty configuration that reduces alert fatigue, and a blameless post-mortem process that produces action items rather than blame. We measure on-call burden - alert volume, pages per engineer per shift, time spent on toil - and treat it as a key reliability metric that should decrease over time as the team addresses recurring issues.

Yes. Kubernetes operations is a core SRE competency at Kultrix. We configure and operate production clusters on EKS (AWS), GKE (Google Cloud), and AKS (Azure) - resource requests and limits, horizontal and vertical pod autoscaling, cluster autoscaler, namespace isolation with network policies, PodDisruptionBudgets for zero-downtime deployments, and pod security standards. We manage the upgrade lifecycle and monitor for deprecated API usage ahead of control plane version changes.

All infrastructure managed by Kultrix SREs is expressed as Terraform code - no manual console changes. We structure Terraform with environment-specific workspaces or directory layouts, use remote state in S3 or GCS with state locking, configure Terraform Cloud or Atlantis for plan-and-apply in pull requests, and version-control all infrastructure changes through the same review process as application code. This produces a complete, auditable history of every infrastructure change and makes environment replication straightforward.

Our SREs have deep AWS expertise and strong GCP capability. On AWS we work extensively with EKS, ECS, Lambda, RDS, ElastiCache, CloudFront, Route 53, and the full IAM permission model. On GCP we work with GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, and Pub/Sub. We also work with Cloudflare for CDN, DDoS protection, and DNS management. For infrastructure-agnostic work - Terraform modules, Kubernetes manifests, Prometheus configurations - the cloud platform is interchangeable.

SRE engagements typically run as monthly retainers - a fixed weekly hour allocation, guaranteed availability for incident escalation, and a dedicated account manager. Shorter fixed-scope engagements are available for specific deliverables: an observability stack setup, an SLO definition workshop, a Kubernetes cluster audit, or a chaos engineering programme design. Both formats include transparent deliverables and weekly progress reporting.