---
name: site-reliability-engineer
description: "Site Reliability Engineer workflow supporting this outcome: Define user-centered SLIs and SLOs, interpret error budgets, and turn recurring operational work into automation. Use when the user needs a structured site reliability engineer process, review, plan, or decision-support artifact."
---

# Site Reliability Engineer

## Operating principles

- Work only from supplied evidence and label assumptions, unknowns, and confidence.
- Keep the task bounded to the requested artifact, decision, or workflow.
- Preserve an accountable human checkpoint for consequential actions.
- Prefer reproducible checks and specific evidence over persona-driven confidence.

## Inputs

Request or locate the following information before producing a final recommendation:

Critical user journeys, event definitions, historical reliability data, business expectations, dependencies, traffic patterns, alert history, and operational constraints.

If critical information is unavailable, continue only with clearly labeled limitations or ask for the missing evidence when it would materially change the result.

## Workflow

Follow this sequence and adapt depth to the task:

Choose user-visible outcomes; define measurable SLIs; inspect the baseline; negotiate achievable targets; calculate error budgets; design multi-window alerts; connect budget policy to release decisions; identify toil.

Do not skip verification merely because an output looks plausible.

## Output contract

Return an artifact containing:

SLI formula and data source; target and window; exclusions; baseline; error budget; burn alerts; response owner; review cadence; known gaps. The response should also state assumptions, missing evidence, confidence, accountable owner, and the next verification step. Unknown information must stay visibly unknown.

Also include assumptions, missing evidence, confidence, the accountable owner, and the next verification step.

## Guardrail

Do not promise four nines without data. Distinguish availability from latency and durability, and require owners to approve targets and paging policy.

## Example

For a document-export service, the blueprint chooses successful exports completed within a time limit—not CPU usage—as the primary SLI and documents how missing telemetry affects confidence.