sla-slo-engineer

SLA & SLO Engineer

When to Use

Select SLIs and document measurement queries, exclusions, and data sources
Set SLO targets, rolling windows, and per-journey or per-tier policies
Define error-budget math, consumption tracking, and policy actions (freeze, focus)
Design multi-window burn-rate alert policies and severity routing
Align customer-facing SLAs with internal SLOs (credits, measurements, carve-outs)
Tier services by criticality and map tiers to targets and review cadence
Run SLO review meetings, executive summaries, and quarterly governance
Estimate capacity headroom implied by latency or availability targets
Publish SLO specs for engineering (YAML/JSON schema, dashboard contracts)

Lead outage mitigation, paging, or on-call rotations → site-reliability-engineer, incident-management-engineer
Negotiate contract language, credits, or legal remedies → commercial-counsel
Build metrics/log/trace pipelines, collectors, or alertmanager config → devops, platform-engineer
Profile application code, load-test, or tune queries only → performance-engineer
Run production readiness reviews, chaos games, or release cutover → site-reliability-engineer, deployment-strategist
Coordinate multi-team program milestones without SLO scope → technical-program-manager

Need	Skill
SRE execution: PRR, incident mitigation, chaos, release gates	`site-reliability-engineer`
Incident program, SEV, on-call, postmortems	`incident-management-engineer`
CI/CD pipelines, DORA, deploy gates wired to SLO policy	`ci-cd-engineer`
Delivery infra, GitOps, alert stack implementation	`devops`
IDP golden paths, platform SLOs for portal/scaffold	`platform-engineer`
Load testing and latency profiling	`performance-engineer`
Rollout strategy and change tiers	`deployment-strategist`
Cross-team launch and RAID	`technical-program-manager`
Contractual SLA terms and redlines	`commercial-counsel`
Data pipeline freshness or warehouse SLAs	`data-system-ops-lead`

Service-level taxonomy, user-centric measurement, boundaries with SRE and legal.

See references/sla_slo_scope_and_principles.md.

Choose SLIs, define queries, exclusions, and validation.

See references/sli_selection_and_measurement.md.

Targets, windows, budget math, and policy actions.

See references/slo_targeting_and_error_budgets.md.

Multi-window alerts, routing, and noise control.

See references/alerting_burn_rates_and_policies.md.

Contract alignment, credits, carve-outs, and communication.

See references/customer_sla_vs_internal_slo.md.

Cadences, dashboards, specs, and executive reporting.

See references/reporting_review_and_governance.md.

SLO specification — SLI definition, query, target, window, exclusions, owners, tier
Error-budget policy — thresholds, actions, escalation, link to release policy
Burn-rate alert policy — windows, multipliers, severity, runbook links
SLA/SLO alignment matrix — customer metric ↔ internal SLI, measurement gaps, carve-outs
Tier catalog — criticality definitions with default targets and review cadence
SLO review pack — budget consumed, trends, top burners, proposed target changes
Capacity note — headroom vs latency/availability target (when in scope)

Measure user outcomes — availability and latency of journeys, not vanity infra metrics
Internal SLO stricter than external SLA — buffer for measurement lag and goodwill
Policy before panic — error-budget actions agreed before budget exhaustion
Alerts prove SLO risk — every page ties to budget burn or imminent breach
Govern with data — reviews change targets from evidence, not anecdotes
Hand off execution — SRE and IM own incident response; this skill owns the level definitions