I find that this job title/role means a lot of different things at different companies. What, generally speaking, does the SRE role entail at your company?
In Uber....
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In my co (not Yahoo) it's a special flower. Someone that understands scalability and reliability, architecture, system design, traffic management, on all, DBs, TCP, failure modes, kernel perf stats, Linux, strace etc (all of Nrendan Gregg's toolkits) and basically has a good sysadmin background ... PLUS, has at least a few years as a backend application software engineer and can go into the app and understand and patch app code to improve reliability, performance, stability. Also needs to be someone with at least average social skills to talk to enough people to get a full understanding on their own.
not sre, but at LinkedIn a lot seem to be software engineering focused and work hand in hand with a paired development organization. when. something breaks they're typically first on the scene .
That's called support.