Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM)
Site Reliability Engineer
System uptime and reliability
What this life looks like
You make sure the internet keeps working. Site Reliability Engineers combine software engineering and operations expertise to build and maintain highly reliable, scalable systems. When millions of people use a service simultaneously, SREs are the reason it does not fall over.
What she actually does
You define and enforce reliability standards including uptime targets (Service Level Objectives), build monitoring and alerting systems, respond to and investigate production incidents, automate repetitive operational tasks, design systems that are resilient to failure, conduct post-incident reviews to prevent recurrence, and continuously work to reduce toil — the manual, repetitive work that slows teams down.
Where you can work
| Sector | Places in Africa |
|---|---|
| Fintech Platforms | Flutterwave, Paystack, Interswitch, OPay — payment systems with critical uptime requirements |
| E-Commerce | Jumia, Takealot — platforms processing high traffic and transaction volumes |
| Telecoms | MTN, Safaricom — network reliability engineering teams |
| Global Tech with African Engineers | Google, Microsoft, Amazon — all employ African SREs in Africa and remotely |
Why it matters in Africa
As African tech companies such as Flutterwave and Paystack scale to millions of users, ensuring their systems remain available 24 hours a day is critical. A payment system that goes down loses real money and destroys user trust. SREs who can build reliability into African fintech and e-commerce platforms are in growing demand.
Your pathway in
- Build a strong foundation in software engineering first — SRE is an advanced discipline
- Study Computer Science or Software Engineering at university
- Learn Linux, networking fundamentals, and cloud platforms thoroughly
- Develop expertise in monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog) and incident management
- Read the free Google Site Reliability Engineering book at sre.google/sre-book
Skills you will need
- Linux and system administration
- Monitoring and observability tools
- Incident management and on-call
- Automation and scripting (Python, Go, Bash)
- Cloud platforms
- Communication under pressure
A woman in this field
Odunayo Eweniyi
Nigeria
Odunayo is the co-founder and COO of PiggyVest, one of Nigeria's leading digital savings and investment platforms with millions of users. A first-class graduate in Computer Engineering from Covenant University, she has built one of Africa's most reliable fintech platforms from the ground up and has been recognised on Forbes Africa 30 Under 30 and Bloomberg 50.
Take your first step
- Read the free Google SRE book at sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents
- Learn Linux fundamentals through the free Linux Foundation courses on edX
- Set up monitoring for a small personal project using free tools such as Grafana Cloud
- Pursue DevOps or cloud engineering experience first — SRE typically builds on this foundation