SRE — Site Reliability Engineering
Definition: A discipline that applies software engineering to operations — automating reliability, performance, and incident response instead of throwing humans at outages.
Example
Standing up an SRE function cut Sev1 incidents by 70% in two quarters and freed engineering to ship features again.
When you'll hear it
SRE shows up most often in engineering planning, architecture reviews, and sprint retrospectives. When someone uses it, they're usually referring to site reliability engineering — and they expect the room to already know what that means.
FAQs
What does SRE stand for?
SRE stands for Site Reliability Engineering.
What does SRE mean in technology and engineering?
A discipline that applies software engineering to operations — automating reliability, performance, and incident response instead of throwing humans at outages.
Where will I hear SRE used at work?
SRE comes up most often in engineering planning, architecture reviews, and sprint retrospectives. It's used as shorthand for site reliability engineering, so people assume you already know the term.