Site Reliability Engineer
Primary stack
Job description
Site Reliability Engineer
Stanowisko: Site Reliability Engineer
About the Position
We are seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to ensure the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of production systems in a fintech company in Poland.
Responsibilities
- Designing and maintaining error budgets and defining SLI, SLO, and SLA for business-critical services
- Building and developing observability platforms – implementing stacks based on Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, or Elastic
- Automating incident response processes – creating runbooks, integrating with PagerDuty/Opsgenie, reducing MTTR below 15 minutes
- Managing infrastructure through Terraform, Pulumi, or Crossplane on AWS, GCP, or Azure
- Capacity planning – modeling workloads, forecasting cloud costs, optimizing expenses (FinOps) by 15-30% quarterly
- Chaos engineering – designing and conducting resilience experiments (Chaos Monkey, Litmus, Gremlin) on production environments
- Ensuring CI/CD pipeline reliability – achieving stable deployment pipelines, zero-downtime deployments, canary, and blue-green releases
- Conducting blameless post-mortems and implementing action items within 5 business days of an incident
- Reducing toil – identifying repetitive operational tasks and automating them, aiming for toil below 30% of team work time
- Mentoring development teams on reliability patterns – circuit breakers, retry policies, graceful degradation
Requirements
| Competency | Required Level | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Linux / Operating Systems | Advanced | Linux system administration at the kernel level, network and disk performance tuning, production troubleshooting |
| Kubernetes / Containerization | Advanced | Minimum 3 years of managing production clusters (EKS, GKE, AKS), Helm, Kustomize, service mesh (Istio/Linkerd) |
| Cloud (AWS / GCP / Azure) | Advanced | Minimum 1 certification (e.g., AWS Solutions Architect, GCP Professional Cloud Architect), multi-cloud experience is a plus |
| Programming (Python / Go / Bash) | Intermediate+ | Creating CLI tools, Kubernetes operators, automation scripts – not just scripting, but production-grade code |
| Observability stack | Advanced | Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK/Loki – designing dashboards and alerts with a low false-positive rate (<5%) |
| IaC (Terraform / Pulumi) | Advanced | State management, reusable modules, drift detection, GitOps pipelines (ArgoCD, Flux) |
| Networking | Intermediate | TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing (L4/L7), CDN, VPN, zero-trust architecture |
| Incident management | Advanced | On-call experience in systems handling >10k RPS, conducting post-mortems, familiarity with Google SRE framework |
| Infrastructure security | Intermediate | Hardening, secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), compliance (SOC2, ISO 27001) |
| Communication and documentation | High | Ability to present reliability metrics to non-technical stakeholders, conducting ADRs and RFCs |
Salary and Market Range 2026
A Senior Site Reliability Engineer in Poland earns between 20,000 to 32,000 PLN gross per month on an employment contract (B2B: 24,000–40,000 PLN net+VAT). The median for candidates with 5-7 years of experience is approximately 26,000 PLN gross/month.
- Location – Warsaw and Kraków offer rates 10-15% higher than the national average; full-remote work eliminates regional differences
- Industry – Fintech and adtech pay in the upper quartile (28,000-32,000 PLN); software houses and startups typically 20,000-25,000 PLN
- Certifications – Holding CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) or AWS Professional increases the offer by 2,000-4,000 PLN
- System scale – Experience with infrastructure >1,000 nodes or >100k RPS justifies rates above 30,000 PLN
- On-call experience – Readiness for 24/7 on-call rotations with weekly rotation impacts the allowance of 1,500-3,000 PLN/month
The standard benefits package for SRE includes: private healthcare (Medicover/Luxmed), sports card, training budget 5,000-12,000 PLN/year, access to conferences (KubeCon, SREcon), choice of Apple/ThinkPad equipment, and 26 days of vacation. Increasingly common are sabbaticals after 3 years of work and stock options in product companies.
How Smartways.io Conducts Headhunting for Site Reliability Engineers?
Recruiting SREs requires an approach combining technical knowledge with precise sourcing. Our process is designed to deliver a shortlist of 3-5 verified candidates in a maximum of 4 weeks.
- Technical briefing and ideal candidate profile (days 1-2) – Conducting a workshop with the hiring manager and/or Principal SRE, defining the technology stack, system scale requirements, on-call model, and team culture.
- Sourcing and outreach (days 3-10) – Searching through a database of 14,000+ IT specialists, GitHub, LinkedIn, and SRE communities (SREcon PL, CNCF meetups). Contacting 60-80 specified candidates, achieving a response rate of 35-45%.
- Technical screening (days 8-15) – Conducting 45-minute interviews verifying: incident response case study, observability architecture, IaC experience. Rejecting about 70% of candidates at this stage.
- Shortlist and interview coordination (days 14-21) – Presenting 3-5 candidates with a full profile (CV, assessment, financial expectations, availability). Coordinating technical interviews on the client side.
- Negotiation and onboarding support (days 18-28) – Supporting offer finalization, negotiating terms, and monitoring the first 90 days of employment under guarantee.
The entire process – from briefing to signing the contract – is completed in 3-4 weeks. In the case of roles requiring security clearance or specific certifications, the timeline may extend by 5-7 business days. Site Reliability Engineer jobs in Poland are a candidate market, so speed of action is a competitive advantage.
FAQ – Common Questions About the Site Reliability Engineer Position
How does a Site Reliability Engineer differ from a DevOps Engineer?
SRE focuses on measuring and improving the reliability of production systems (SLI/SLO/error budgets), while DevOps Engineer focuses more broadly on automating CI/CD pipelines and fostering a dev-ops culture. In practice, 60-70% of the tools overlap, but SRE has a stronger emphasis on software engineering – Google requires SREs to spend a maximum of 50% of their time on operations.
How long does it take to recruit a Senior Site Reliability Engineer?
When working with a specialized agency like Smartways.io, the process takes 3-4 weeks from briefing to offer submission. Internal recruitment on its own takes an average of 8-12 weeks due to limited access to passive SRE candidates.
Which certifications increase the market value of a Site Reliability Engineer?
The most significant impact on salary comes from: CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) – an average of +3,000 PLN/month, AWS Solutions Architect Professional – +2,500 PLN/month, and Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer – +2,000 PLN/month. HashiCorp Terraform Associate and CKS (Kubernetes Security) certifications are also advantageous.
Can a Site Reliability Engineer transition to an AI Engineer position?
Yes, the path from SRE to MLOps/AI Infrastructure Engineer is becoming increasingly popular. SREs bring skills in scalable infrastructure, monitoring, and automation, which are essential for deploying ML models into production. This requires supplementing knowledge of ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow) and MLflow/Kubeflow pipelines – typically 6-9 months of intensive learning.
What does the career path of an SRE look like – from junior to staff/principal?
Typical path: Junior SRE (0-2 years, 10,000-15,000 PLN) → Mid SRE (2-4 years, 15,000-22,000 PLN) → Senior SRE (4-7 years, 20,000-32,000 PLN) → Staff SRE (7-10 years, 30,000-42,000 PLN) → Principal SRE / Head of Reliability (10+ years, 38,000-55,000 PLN). At the staff level and above, the role shifts towards defining reliability strategies and mentoring teams.
Does an SRE have to be on-call, and how does it affect work-life balance?
In most organizations – yes. The standard is a weekly rotation in teams of 4-6 people, meaning on-call every 4-6 weeks. Mature organizations use follow-the-sun (teams in different time zones) and compensate on-call with an allowance of 1,500-3,000 PLN/month. Well-defined error budgets and automated alerts reduce the number of nightly interventions to 1-2 per month.
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