SRE
Site reliability engineer: a role focused on keeping systems online, measuring reliability, and responding to incidents.
What it tells you about a developer
SRE experience certifies production maturity: this person has been paged at 3am for a real outage, and then built systems so it happens less. SREs from high-scale companies transfer well to any infrastructure role. The clearest evidence of that maturity is a specific incident they owned, including what changed afterward.
Google created the SRE role to apply software engineering to operations. SREs set reliability targets, build tooling that prevents outages, and carry on-call duty. In hiring practice the title overlaps heavily with DevOps engineer. SRE leans harder into measurement, incident response, and accountability for uptime.