The short answer
A DevOps engineer usually owns the delivery path: pipelines, infrastructure as code, environments and release. A site reliability engineer owns production reliability: service level objectives, error budgets, on-call, capacity and incident response. Hire DevOps first if shipping is slow or risky; hire an SRE first if production is unstable or on-call is burning people out.
Hiring for this? See how we vet site reliability engineers
| DevOps engineer | Site reliability engineer | |
|---|---|---|
| Owns | The path from commit to production | Production behaviour once there |
| Measures success by | Lead time, deploy frequency, change failure rate | SLOs, error budget, incident load |
| Typical work | CI/CD, infrastructure as code, environments | On-call, capacity planning, incident response, toil reduction |
| Hire first when | Releases are slow, manual or frightening | Production is unstable or on-call is unsustainable |
Why the screens differ
Conntal's DevOps screen puts a candidate in an incident during a Kubernetes node upgrade; the SRE screen asks what to do with an error budget that is 70 percent consumed with a launch pending. The first tests operational judgement in the delivery path; the second tests whether the candidate will trade features for reliability when the numbers say so.
When one person does both
Small teams often need one engineer to do both. That works until on-call starts eating the delivery work. When it does, split the roles — and screen for each separately, because strength in one does not imply the other.
Hiring for this?
Conntal places site reliability engineers screened by practitioners who run the platform in production, on contract, contract-to-hire or direct hire.
Related questions
What is the difference between SRE and DevOps?
DevOps engineers usually own the delivery path: pipelines, infrastructure as code and release. SREs own production reliability: SLOs, error budgets, on-call and incident response.
Should I hire an SRE or a DevOps engineer first?
Hire a DevOps engineer first if shipping is slow or risky. Hire an SRE first if production is unstable or on-call is unsustainable.