sla-slo-engineer

name

sla-slo-engineer

description

Guides SLA and SLO engineering—SLI selection and measurement specs, SLO targets and error budgets, multi-window burn-rate alerting policies, customer-facing SLA vs internal SLO alignment, criticality tiering, reporting and review cadences, and capacity implications of service levels. Use when defining SLIs, setting SLO targets, designing error-budget policy, burn-rate alerts, availability or latency SLOs, SLO reviews, or documenting SLO specs for engineering—not on-call or incident command (site-reliability-engineer, incident-management-engineer), contractual legal SLA negotiation (commercial-counsel), full observability stack implementation (platform-engineer, devops), or application performance tuning only (performance-engineer). Triggers: SLA, SLO, SLI, service level objective, error budget, burn rate alert, availability target, latency SLO, define SLOs, SLO review, customer SLA.

SLA & SLO Engineer

When to Use

• Select SLIs and document measurement queries, exclusions, and data sources
• Set SLO targets, rolling windows, and per-journey or per-tier policies
• Define error-budget math, consumption tracking, and policy actions (freeze, focus)
• Design multi-window burn-rate alert policies and severity routing
• Align customer-facing SLAs with internal SLOs (credits, measurements, carve-outs)
• Tier services by criticality and map tiers to targets and review cadence
• Run SLO review meetings, executive summaries, and quarterly governance
• Estimate capacity headroom implied by latency or availability targets
• Publish SLO specs for engineering (YAML/JSON schema, dashboard contracts)

When NOT to Use

• Lead outage mitigation, paging, or on-call rotations → site-reliability-engineer, incident-management-engineer
• Negotiate contract language, credits, or legal remedies → commercial-counsel
• Build metrics/log/trace pipelines, collectors, or alertmanager config → devops, platform-engineer
• Profile application code, load-test, or tune queries only → performance-engineer
• Run production readiness reviews, chaos games, or release cutover → site-reliability-engineer, deployment-strategist
• Coordinate multi-team program milestones without SLO scope → technical-program-manager

Related skills

Need	Skill
SRE execution: PRR, incident mitigation, chaos, release gates	site-reliability-engineer
Incident program, SEV, on-call, postmortems	incident-management-engineer
CI/CD pipelines, DORA, deploy gates wired to SLO policy	ci-cd-engineer
Delivery infra, GitOps, alert stack implementation	devops
IDP golden paths, platform SLOs for portal/scaffold	platform-engineer
Load testing and latency profiling	performance-engineer
Rollout strategy and change tiers	deployment-strategist
Cross-team launch and RAID	technical-program-manager
Contractual SLA terms and redlines	commercial-counsel
Data pipeline freshness or warehouse SLAs	data-system-ops-lead

Core Workflows

1. Scope and principles

Service-level taxonomy, user-centric measurement, boundaries with SRE and legal.

See references/sla_slo_scope_and_principles.md.

2. SLI selection and measurement

Choose SLIs, define queries, exclusions, and validation.

See references/sli_selection_and_measurement.md.

3. SLO targeting and error budgets

Targets, windows, budget math, and policy actions.

See references/slo_targeting_and_error_budgets.md.

4. Alerting, burn rates, and policies

Multi-window alerts, routing, and noise control.

See references/alerting_burn_rates_and_policies.md.

5. Customer SLA vs internal SLO

Contract alignment, credits, carve-outs, and communication.

See references/customer_sla_vs_internal_slo.md.

6. Reporting, review, and governance

Cadences, dashboards, specs, and executive reporting.

See references/reporting_review_and_governance.md.

Outputs

• SLO specification — SLI definition, query, target, window, exclusions, owners, tier
• Error-budget policy — thresholds, actions, escalation, link to release policy
• Burn-rate alert policy — windows, multipliers, severity, runbook links
• SLA/SLO alignment matrix — customer metric ↔ internal SLI, measurement gaps, carve-outs
• Tier catalog — criticality definitions with default targets and review cadence
• SLO review pack — budget consumed, trends, top burners, proposed target changes
• Capacity note — headroom vs latency/availability target (when in scope)

Principles

• Measure user outcomes — availability and latency of journeys, not vanity infra metrics
• Internal SLO stricter than external SLA — buffer for measurement lag and goodwill
• Policy before panic — error-budget actions agreed before budget exhaustion
• Alerts prove SLO risk — every page ties to budget burn or imminent breach
• Govern with data — reviews change targets from evidence, not anecdotes
• Hand off execution — SRE and IM own incident response; this skill owns the level definitions

When to load references

• Scope and taxonomy → references/sla_slo_scope_and_principles.md
• SLI design → references/sli_selection_and_measurement.md
• Targets and budgets → references/slo_targeting_and_error_budgets.md
• Burn alerts → references/alerting_burn_rates_and_policies.md
• Customer SLA → references/customer_sla_vs_internal_slo.md
• Reviews and governance → references/reporting_review_and_governance.md