Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is what you get when you treat operations as if it’s a software problem. Our mission is to progress, protect, and provide for the software and systems behind all of Google’s public services - Search, Ads, Gmail, Android, YouTube, and AppEngine, to name just a few - with an ever-watchful eye on their availability, latency, performance, and capacity.
This is an unusual job, unlike others in the industry. Like traditional operations groups, we keep important, revenue-critical systems up and running despite hurricanes, bandwidth outages, and configuration problems. Unlike traditional operations groups, we also have full access to and authority to fix, extend, and scale the code to keep it working and harden it against all the vagaries of the Internet. We hire people from both systems and software backgrounds. Strong candidates will have experience with both.
Just as what we do is unique, where we do it is unique too. At Google, we have the good fortune to have developed many interesting systems ranging from planet-spanning databases to near real-time scalable data warehousing to fault-tolerant datastream joining. In SRE, we flip between the fine-grained detail of disk driver I/O scheduling to the big picture of continental-level service capacity, across a range of systems and a user population measured in billions. We own those products in production. We drive reliability and performance across massive scale by mastering the full depth of the stack. We literally do learn something new every day - usually surprising things - that have the potential to transform the lives of billions of our users around the world.
