Reliability practice
SLOs and error budgetson-call designcapacity planningchaos testing
Platform and cloud · screened by Ace8
Hire site reliability engineers vetted by a production practitioner
A site reliability engineer keeps production trustworthy: error budgets, on-call, capacity, and the incident response that follows when those fail. Conntal places senior SREs screened on real incidents by Ace8 and AceMQ practitioners who run enterprise platforms in production themselves.
Indicative rate: from $80/hr nearshore or offshore and $120/hr onshore. See what moves it.
Contract, contract-to-hire or direct · onshore, nearshore, offshore · reviewed 31 October 2026
- Screen owner
- Platform engineering lead · Ace8Kubernetes and DevSecOps delivery across EKS.
- Titles we place
- Site reliability engineer · Senior SRE · Production engineer · Observability engineer · Incident response lead
- Platforms we screen on
- SLOs and error budgetson-call designcapacity planningchaos testing
Rates
What a contract site reliability engineer costs
Senior contract site reliability engineer rates start at $80/hr nearshore or offshore and $120/hr onshore. These are indicative from-rates, last reviewed 31 October 2026.
| Location model | From (USD per hour) | Where engineers are based |
|---|---|---|
| OnshoreHighest rate | $120/hr | US-based, on client time zones, cleared where the engagement requires it. |
| NearshoreOur default recommendation | $80/hr | Latin America and Canada, four hours or less of overlap loss, same working day. |
| OffshoreLowest rate | $80/hr | Europe, India and South East Asia. |
What moves the number
- Platform scarcity. The fewer engineers who have run Site reliability engineer in production, the higher the rate.
- Seniority. The figures are for senior engineers; staff and principal levels cost more.
- Clearance and residency. Cleared or on-site work narrows the pool and sits in the onshore column.
- Term. Length, hours and the engagement model change the rate; contract-to-hire and direct placement are priced differently.
Indicative from-rates for senior contract engineers, USD per hour. The final rate depends on platform scarcity, seniority, clearance and term.
The screen
How we vet site reliability engineers: the published screen
Every site reliability engineer is screened on the scenario below by the Platform engineering lead at Ace8. The senior and mid answers are published so you can judge our bar before you engage us, and candidates know what they are walking into.
The screen · Site reliability engineer
Conntal Vetting Standard
Scenario put to the candidate
Your error budget for the quarter is 70 percent consumed with five weeks to go. Product wants to ship a launch that touches the checkout path. What do you do?
Vetted by
Platform engineering lead · Ace8
A senior answer contains
- Treats the error budget as a decision instrument, not a report, and says who owns the call.
- Separates 'freeze everything' from 'change what we ship and how we ship it' — canary, flag, staged rollout.
- Asks whether the budget was consumed by one incident or by steady erosion, because the answer changes the response.
- Has actually had this argument with a product owner and describes how it landed.
Where a mid answer stops
- Proposes a blanket change freeze with no path to ship.
- Cannot say what the SLO is measuring or who agreed it.
- Treats the error budget as an SRE-team metric rather than a shared contract.
What we screen on
Site reliability engineer skills we screen for
Site reliability engineer candidates are screened on reliability practice, observability and incident, among others, against the stack you actually run rather than a generic checklist.
Observability
PrometheusGrafanaOpenTelemetrySplunkdistributed tracing
Incident
Netflix Dispatchpostmortem disciplinepaging hygienerunbooks
Platform
KubernetesNginxTomcatservice meshmulti-region failover
Messaging reliability
RabbitMQKafkaqueue depth as a signalbackpressure
Titles this covers
Site reliability engineer job titles we place
We place 6 titles in this area, from Site reliability engineer to Platform reliability lead. They overlap and are used inconsistently between companies, so tell us the outcome you need and we will tell you which title actually fits it.
- Site reliability engineer
- Senior SRE
- Production engineer
- Observability engineer
- Incident response lead
- Platform reliability lead
The platforms, run in production by our network
Engagement
Ways to hire site reliability engineers
Platform work usually starts with a defined piece of change and becomes ongoing ownership, which is why most site reliability engineers engagements begin on contract. All three models are available, in any location model.
Contract
A vetted engineer embedded in your team for a defined term.
Hourly, billed against an approved SOW. Most common for migrations, upgrades and capacity surges where the work has an end date.
Contract staffingContract-to-hire
Work together first, convert when it is obviously working.
A defined conversion window and a pre-agreed fee, so the decision to hire is a business decision rather than a negotiation.
Contract-to-hire staffingDirect placement
A permanent hire, screened to the same standard.
One-time fee against first-year base. Used where the role is a long-term platform owner rather than project capacity.
Direct placement staffingNot a fit if
When to look elsewhere for site reliability engineers
We are the wrong choice if any of these describe your role, and we would rather say so on the first call.
- You want a ticket-queue operations role without on-call or incident ownership.
- You need a delivery-pipeline engineer; that is the DevOps screen, and we run it separately.
- Your team has no paging process or runbooks yet and expects one contractor to create the whole reliability practice alone.
How it works
How hiring site reliability engineers through Conntal works
- 01
Scope
A practitioner scopes the role
An engineer who runs this technology reads your brief and tells you what is missing from it. Most briefs we receive ask for the wrong seniority or the wrong title. - 02
Screen
We screen, then shortlist
Sourcing is ours; the technical decision belongs to the vetting practitioner. You only see candidates who passed the scenario on this page. - 03
Start
Start, convert or replace
Contract, contract-to-hire or direct. If the fit is wrong we say so first and replace rather than defend the placement.
Screen owner
Who vets our site reliability engineers: Platform engineering lead, Ace8
Kubernetes and DevSecOps delivery across EKS, AKS, GKE and OpenShift; incident response with a 15-minute commitment.
FAQ
Site reliability engineers: what buyers ask
Something not covered here? Send the requirement and a practitioner answers it, not a sales queue.
How much does a contract site reliability engineer cost per hour?
Indicative senior contract from-rates are $80/hr nearshore or offshore and $120/hr onshore (USD, reviewed 31 October 2026). The final rate depends on platform scarcity, seniority, clearance and term. Contract-to-hire and direct placement are priced differently, and the delivery models page sets out how.
How fast can a site reliability engineer start?
We do not promise a start date before we have seen the brief. A practitioner reads it, usually within one business day, and tells you whether we can staff it. Timing after that depends on the stack, the seniority and the location model.
Do you provide SRE staffing and SRE staff augmentation?
Yes. Site reliability engineers are available on contract as staff augmentation, contract-to-hire, or as direct hires, screened on a real production incident by a practitioner who runs on-call for enterprise platforms.
What is a site reliability engineer?
A site reliability engineer applies software engineering to operations. They own service level objectives, error budgets, capacity, on-call and incident response, and they spend engineering effort on removing the toil that operations would otherwise absorb.
What is the difference between an SRE and a DevOps engineer?
DevOps engineers usually own the path to production — pipelines, environments, infrastructure as code. SREs own production itself — reliability targets, on-call, capacity, incident response. The overlap is real but the screen is different, so we run them as separate roles.
Do you place SREs on contract?
Yes. Contract, contract-to-hire and direct placement are all available. Contract is common where a team needs reliability practice stood up; direct is common where the role is permanent on-call ownership.
How do you screen for incident capability?
With a real incident, not a hypothetical. The screen puts the candidate into a production scenario with incomplete information and watches how they sequence it, what they ask for first, and whether they can separate a symptom from a cause.
Do your SREs have on-call experience in regulated environments?
Many do. The parent practices run production support for enterprises in 26+ countries with a 15-minute response commitment, so candidates are screened against that standard rather than against a job description.
Can you staff an SRE nearshore?
Yes, and for follow-the-sun on-call coverage a mixed model often works better than a single location. Nearshore is our default recommendation for cost and overlap; offshore adds genuine out-of-hours coverage.
Can we convert a contractor to full time, and what does it cost?
Yes. Contract-to-hire sets a conversion window and a pre-agreed fee at the start, so converting is a business decision rather than a negotiation. The fee is agreed per engagement; ask for it with your brief.
Related
Related roles
Need site reliability delivered as a project or supported as a service instead of staffed? Ace8 does that directly.
Need site reliability engineers? Start with the brief.
Send the requirement and an engineer who runs this technology will tell you what is missing before we source anyone.