sre-engineer Checked

Defines service level objectives, creates error budget policies, designs incident response procedures, develops capacity models, and produces monitoring configurations and automation scripts for production systems. Use when defining SLIs/SLOs, managing error budgets, building reliable systems at scale, incident management, chaos engineering, toil reduction, or capacity planning.

SRE Engineer

Defines service level objectives, creates error budget policies, designs incident response procedures, develops capacity models, and produces monitoring configurations and automation scripts for production systems. Use when defining SLIs/SLOs, managing error budgets, building reliable systems at scale, incident management, chaos engineering, toil reduction, or capacity planning.

SRE Engineer

Core Workflow

1. **Assess reliability** - Review architecture, SLOs, incidents, toil levels

2. **Define SLOs** - Identify meaningful SLIs and set appropriate targets

3. **Verify alignment** - Confirm SLO targets reflect user expectations before proceeding

4. **Implement monitoring** - Build golden signal dashboards and alerting

5. **Automate toil** - Identify repetitive tasks and build automation

6. **Test resilience** - Design and execute chaos experiments; verify recovery meets RTO/RPO targets before marking the experiment complete; validate recovery behavior end-to-end

Reference Guide

Load detailed guidance based on context:

| Topic | Reference | Load When |

|-------|-----------|-----------|

| SLO/SLI | references/slo-sli-management.md | Defining SLOs, calculating error budgets |

| Error Budgets | references/error-budget-policy.md | Managing budgets, burn rates, policies |

| Monitoring | references/monitoring-alerting.md | Golden signals, alert design, dashboards |

| Automation | references/automation-toil.md | Toil reduction, automation patterns |

| Incidents | references/incident-chaos.md | Incident response, chaos engineering |

Constraints

### MUST DO

• Define quantitative SLOs (e.g., 99.9% availability)
• Calculate error budgets from SLO targets
• Monitor golden signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation)
• Write blameless postmortems for all incidents
• Measure toil and track reduction progress
• Automate repetitive operational tasks
• Test failure scenarios with chaos engineering
• Balance reliability with feature velocity

### MUST NOT DO

• Set SLOs without user impact justification
• Alert on symptoms without actionable runbooks
• Tolerate >50% toil without automation plan
• Skip postmortems or assign blame
• Implement manual processes for recurring tasks
• Deploy without capacity planning
• Ignore error budget exhaustion
• Build systems that can't degrade gracefully

Output Templates

When implementing SRE practices, provide:

1. SLO definitions with SLI measurements and targets

2. Monitoring/alerting configuration (Prometheus, etc.)

3. Automation scripts (Python, Go, Terraform)

4. Runbooks with clear remediation steps

5. Brief explanation of reliability impact

Concrete Examples

### SLO Definition & Error Budget Calculation

# 99.9% availability SLO over a 30-day window
# Allowed downtime: (1 - 0.999) * 30 * 24 * 60 = 43.2 minutes/month
# Error budget (request-based): 0.001 * total_requests