Mention your expertise in cloud services.
As a site reliability engineer, you should have advanced knowledge of cloud infrastructure to ensure cloud deployment automation. You should be familiar with tools like AWS and Microsoft Azure.
Most companies are constantly implementing new features to stay competitive and provide a high-level user experience. However, these changes often affect IT infrastructure and produce downtime and errors, which make the software unreliable. Ideally, applications should follow a service-level agreement, which is a determined level of downtime.
That’s why the operations team work to protect the IT infrastructure by monitoring errors and implementing new guidelines for the development team. On one hand, we have developers wanting to release new features fast, and on the other hand, we have the operations team trying to keep up with all these changes.
This is where site reliability engineers enter the game and fill that gap. Instead of having the Ops team monitor infrastructure manually and alert developers, SREs create automation tools that notify developers of possible downtime or errors. This takes some weight off the ops team's shoulders and ensures that developers keep releasing new updates by maintaining the error budget (a threshold of the minimum allowable outages).
Since you’ll spend the majority of your time building automation tools, you should highlight your programming skills on your resume. Include the coding languages and tools you use for automation, such as Ruby or Javascript. Since this is a highly complex role, you should focus on including only technical skills on your resume rather than including soft skills.
Site reliability engineers are also part of the customer service activities, not only because they are contributing to the user experience continuous improvement. Some companies include a site reliability engineer in the technical support team because they are more efficient at proving solutions. They can also gather information from user incidents to develop post-mortem research. Since the majority of your time will be spent on developing tools, you should highlight your ability to write clean code on your resume.
SRE managers lead the SRE team by creating policies and strategies to reduce the project’s downtime. They determine the best way to move forward and reduce downtime risks. SRE managers also work closely with other team members, such as operations and software engineers. You should demonstrate deep knowledge of operating systems in your resume.
Since this is a highly technical career, it’s in the skills section where you should try to stand out. Your SRE resume should demonstrate you have advanced knowledge of operating, systems, databases, and cloud services. That’s why you should include keywords like database management, AWS, or Microsoft Azure.
You should also mention the techniques you use for reducing downtime and improving the reliability of software development. For example, you can include skills like incident response, continuous integration, and automation. If you want more ideas of skills to include in your SRE resume, take a look at our selection.
This word cloud highlights the important keywords that appear on Site Reliability Engineer job descriptions and resumes. The bigger the word, the more frequently it appears on job postings, and the more 'important' it is.
If you want to demonstrate a tangible result of your value, you should mention your achievements on your resume. You can talk about how you reduced the downtime of a particular project or how your SRE techniques enhanced the development process.
However, it is important to use the appropriate words on your resume. That’s why action verbs can be helpful. They will help you express your achievements accurately and concisely, by using one single word. Some examples of strong action verbs for your SRE resume include “automated,” “reduced,”, and “streamlined.” Check out more action verbs below.
For a full list of effective resume action verbs, visit Resume Action Verbs.
If you're a senior-level employee, or you're changing careers to become a Site Reliability Engineer, it's useful to add a paragraph at the top of your resume highlighting your most impressive accomplishments. This is called a resume summary.
Here's an example of a summary that can be used on a Site Reliability Engineer resume.
A resume summary is a totally optional section, and in most cases, it's better to leave it out of your resume than include it. For example, if you're a student or mid-level hire, you should not include a summary, and instead use the space to add to your work experience.
To learn how to write an effective resume summary for your Site Reliability Engineer resume, or figure out if you need one, please read Site Reliability Engineer Resume Summary Examples, or Site Reliability Engineer Resume Objective Examples.