Sometimes people ask me what I do and I’m not really sure how to answer them. My answer tends to depend on social setting, what I’ve been working on, and if I was on call that week. No matter the circumstances, it usually comes out pretty boring and terribly short.

This really sucks though, because I actually really like my job and think that it’s interesting, if only I could articulate it.

So here’s some attempt at explaining what I do:

• I’m an SRE, or Service Reliability Engineer, at Heroku. Typically, SRE stands for Site Reliability Engineer, however we’ve modernized it at Heroku because what is even a site anymore?

• My week-to-week is wildly unpredictable. This week I’m conducting an operational review of one of our key platform components, last week I was investigating and addressing database bloat, and the week before I was the on-call incident commander and quite busy due to several incidents that occurred.

• Speaking of the incident commander role, part of my job includes defining how we respond to incidents. At first glance it seems easy: Get paged and show up. And then you respond to your first 24-hour slow-burning incident and realize that you’ve got more work to do.

• Following incidents, I also schedule and faciliate retrospectives. We practice blameless postmortems and these tend to be incredibly constructive.

• I also analyze past incident data and look for patterns and trends. Wondering if there’s a day of week that has a higher probability of experiencing an incident? Yeah, it’s Friday.

• When all is quiet, I review dashboards and investigate anomolies. Wondering what that weird spike or dip is that seems to happen every once in a while? Ask me, I’ve probably pulled that thread before (and if I haven’t, I’ll be terribly curious).

• And sometimes I build integration tests and tools. I wrote elbping, for instance, because ELBs were terrible to troubleshoot during an incident.

• And, most importantly, I mentor other SREs and software engineers. This is the single biggest thing I can do in terms of its impact, and probably most rewarding, too.

So there you have it, that’s what I do.

P.S. - If this sounds interesting to you, we’re hiring!