Staff Site Reliability Engineer Resume Example
Hiring managers evaluating Staff Site Reliability Engineers look for organizational reliability influence at global scale, not individual ticket execution.
This resume is for staff site reliability engineers who architect global-scale infrastructure and set technical direction across multiple teams, but aren't yet responsible for departmental headcount or executive-level engineering budgets.
- Evidence of cross-functional technical leadership and multi-team influence
- Proven ability to architect systems for high availability at global scale
- Demonstrable impact on engineering-wide operational efficiency or cost reduction
- Summary emphasizing high-level technical ownership and scale
- Technical skills categorized by infrastructure and orchestration domains
- Professional experience focused on high-stakes architectural outcomes
Destiny Thompson
Summary
Experience
- Architected a multi-region failover strategy across 3 cloud providers, maintaining 99.995% availability and preventing an estimated $1.2M in potential downtime-related revenue loss.
- Reduced annual cloud infrastructure spend by $840K through automated rightsizing and spot instance orchestration for non-critical workloads.
- Spearheaded the adoption of SLO-based alerting across 14 engineering teams, resulting in a 55% reduction in non-actionable on-call pages.
- Directed the migration of legacy container orchestration to a unified Kubernetes platform, impacting 8 million monthly active users.
- Engineered a custom Prometheus-based observability pipeline that processed 4M metrics per second, decreasing MTTR from 38 minutes to 14 minutes.
- Optimized CI/CD runner scaling logic, cutting build wait times by 42% and saving approximately $315K in annual compute costs.
- Led a task force of 7 engineers to overhaul incident response protocols, reducing repeat high-severity incidents by 62%.
- Mentored 6 junior and mid-level SREs on distributed systems design and Go-based tooling development.
- Automated 100% of infrastructure provisioning using Terraform and Ansible, eliminating manual configuration drift across 4 environments.
- Scaled the primary PostgreSQL cluster to handle a 4x increase in write throughput during a period of rapid user growth.
- Established the first on-call rotation and incident response framework for the engineering organization, improving service ownership.
Education
Skills
Kubernetes · Docker · Terraform · Python · Linux · Prometheus · Go · AWS · GCP · Helm · CI/CD · Distributed Systems · SLO Management · Infrastructure as Code
What makes this resume effective
- BRIDGE: This resume meets the hiring bar for staff site reliability engineer by demonstrating cross-team technical strategy, significant infrastructure cost savings, and global-scale reliability ownership.
- Notice how the experience at Vercel highlights a multi-region failover strategy across three cloud providers, which signals the high-level architectural thinking required for this role.
- This resume shows organizational influence by detailing how Destiny spearheaded SLO-based alerting across 14 engineering teams to reduce on-call fatigue.
How to write better bullet points
Managed Kubernetes clusters and handled deployments.
Directed the migration of legacy container orchestration to a unified Kubernetes platform, impacting 8 million monthly active users.
It moves from a task-based description to showing large-scale ownership and the massive scope of the impact.
Improved the monitoring system to reduce alerts.
Spearheaded the adoption of SLO-based alerting across 14 engineering teams, resulting in a 55% reduction in non-actionable on-call pages.
It demonstrates organization-wide influence and provides a specific metric for operational improvement.
Fixed high-severity incidents and helped with on-call.
Led a task force of 7 engineers to overhaul incident response protocols, reducing repeat high-severity incidents by 62%.
It highlights leadership and a permanent reduction in systemic risk rather than just reactive firefighting.
Staff Site Reliability Engineer resume writing tips
- Quantify impact in terms of business revenue or infrastructure cost savings to prove seniority.
- Highlight projects where you influenced multiple teams, such as rolling out organization-wide observability standards.
- Emphasize architectural decisions that improved global system availability or disaster recovery across different cloud providers.
Common mistakes
- Focusing too much on individual ticket resolution or small-scale bug fixes rather than systemic reliability improvements.
- Failing to mention cross-team mentorship or technical leadership, which are essential for proving influence without formal management authority.
- Omitting the business context of technical wins, making it unclear why a specific architectural change mattered to the company's bottom line.
Frequently asked questions
Is this resume right for someone with 10+ years of experience? Yes if your recent roles involved setting technical roadmaps and solving organization-wide problems rather than just executing tasks.
Yes if your recent roles involved setting technical roadmaps and solving organization-wide problems rather than just executing tasks.
Yes, if your recent roles involved setting technical roadmaps and solving problems for an entire engineering organization. It is less effective if your experience remains focused on executing tasks within a single team without broader influence.
What if my background is only in AWS and not multi-cloud? Yes, because hiring managers prioritize architectural depth and high availability over the specific cloud provider used.
Yes, because hiring managers prioritize architectural depth and high availability over the specific cloud provider used.
Most hiring managers value the depth of architectural understanding over the specific cloud provider. You can adapt the Vercel example to show deep optimization and high availability within a single complex environment.
What if I don't have metrics like the million-dollar savings shown here? Use percentage improvements or scale-based metrics like page reduction to demonstrate impact when absolute dollar amounts aren't available.
Use percentage improvements or scale-based metrics like page reduction to demonstrate impact when absolute dollar amounts aren't available.
You can emphasize percentage improvements or scale-based metrics instead. In this resume, Destiny uses both percentages like the 55% page reduction and absolute numbers to provide a clear picture of impact.
How much should I change before applying? Keep the core impact framing, but update technologies and lead with your most significant cross-team initiative.
Keep the core impact framing, but update technologies and lead with your most significant cross-team initiative.
The core structure and the way impact is framed should remain, but the specific technologies must match your expertise. You should ensure your most significant cross-team initiative is the first bullet under your current role.
What do hiring managers focus on at this level? They look for independent system design that improves global resilience and cost-efficiency while elevating the performance of surrounding teams.
They look for independent system design that improves global resilience and cost-efficiency while elevating the performance of surrounding teams.
They look for evidence that you can operate independently and improve the work of those around you. The focus is on your ability to design systems that are resilient to failure and cost-efficient at scale.
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