| 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
