In essence, a production engineer is role that has the responsibility to preserve the operational continuity of critical production services. In real life, they are fixers who enjoy getting their hands dirty and keep money making services running.
Compared to a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), a Production Engineer works more closely with application engineers, aka full-stack engineers. The production engineer’s focus is on the application stack and the corresponding infrastructure components like databases, caches, and queues.
A Site Reliability Engineer’s energy is directed operating and improving the platform that other engineering teams use. A SRE works with tools like Kubernetes, Argo, and Terraform, while a Production Engineer will work more closely with with application code.
Production Engineer will spend their time building dashboards with application and business context in mind, e.g., dashboard that tracks the p95 run time of jobs in the critical task queue that were initiated by high value accounts (HVA).
In contrast, SREs build more generic dashboards that are suitable for every team in the organization. More specifically, a SRE engineering teams build dashboards that track responses by status (200’s vs. 400’s vs. 500’s) and the p95 response time for the service.
Similar to SREs, Production Engineers are not responsible for re-architecting or re-implementing applications. This work is handled by product managers, application developers and architects.
Finally, unlike SRE’s, Production Engineers aren’t directly involved in Security and Risk Management. Implementing access controls, managing vulnerabilities, or ensuring compliance falls near the realm of SRE known as DevSecOps.
In search for a production engineer? Reach out, say hi, I’d love to hear from you.