Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) have a considerable set of tasks to juggle no matter where they work or how long their company has had an SRE practice. But if you’re the very first SRE to join an organization – as many SREs are these days, given that the SRE trend is trickling down into smaller and smaller companies – you face a special group of challenges.

You may find it difficult to get buy-in for SRE from other technical teams. You may struggle to know how to convince your boss that the company’s decision to hire an SRE is paying off. You probably worry that you’ll end up being over-extended because you are on the only SRE at the place, and so on.