Contract
A vetted engineer embedded in your team for a defined term.
Hire site reliability engineers
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 carry a 15-minute response commitment on enterprise platforms themselves.
The screen · Site reliability engineerConntal 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?
The full rubric, including what separates a senior answer from a mid one, is directly below.
Screened by practitioners
Ace8 and AceMQ engineers, not recruiters
130+
enterprises served across 26+ countries
Contract, C2H or direct
onshore, nearshore or offshore
The screen
What we actually ask.
This is the rubric a practitioner uses when they assess a site reliability engineer. We publish it so you can judge our bar before you engage us — and so candidates know exactly what they are walking into.
The screen · Site reliability engineerConntal 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?
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.
Titles this covers
One brief, several job titles.
These titles overlap heavily and are used inconsistently between companies. 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
What we screen on
Technologies, by category.
Candidates are screened against the stack you actually run, not a generic checklist. Messaging appears on every role because it is where our deepest bench sits.
Reliability practice
SLOs and error budgetson-call designcapacity planningchaos testing
Observability
PrometheusGrafanaOpenTelemetrySplunkdistributed tracing
Incident
Netflix Dispatchpostmortem disciplinepaging hygienerunbooks
Platform
KubernetesNginxTomcatservice meshmulti-region failover
Messaging reliability
RabbitMQKafkaqueue depth as a signalbackpressure
Engagement
Contract, contract-to-hire or direct.
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.
Contract-to-hire
Work together first, convert when it is obviously working.
Direct placement
A permanent hire, screened to the same standard.
Location
Global bench, nearshore first.
We staff globally. Nearshore is our default recommendation because it preserves same-working-day overlap while aligning cost with budget.
OnshoreHighest rate
NearshoreOur default recommendation
OffshoreLowest rate
Rate bands and procurement detail on the delivery models page.
How it works
Three steps, and the first one is not a recruiter.
- 01
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
We screen, then shortlist
Sourcing is ours; the technical decision belongs to the vetting practitioner. You see candidates who have already passed the scenario published on this page.
- 03
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.
Who vets site reliability engineers
A named engineer owns this screen.
Platform engineering lead
Kubernetes and DevSecOps delivery across EKS, AKS, GKE and OpenShift; incident response with a 15-minute commitment.
Name and headshot pending — see /how-we-vet
The full rubric, the funnel and every vetting practitioner are on the Conntal Vetting Standard page.
FAQ
Site reliability engineers: what buyers ask
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.
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.