The Organizational Challenge of Site Reliability Engineering

SRE is one of the most misunderstood roles in tech. By design, it sits at the intersection of multiple domains:

- Infrastructure & Platform Engineering

- Security & Compliance

- Development & Operations

- Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

- Performance & Scalability

This cross-functional nature is SRE’s strength but it’s also where organizational friction often emerges.

I’ve observed a pattern across companies: when roles aren’t clearly defined, territorial conflicts arise. “Who owns DR planning?” “Is BCDR an InfoSec responsibility or SRE?” “Who manages security tooling?”

At companies like Google, Netflix, and AWS, this is well-established: service teams (including SRE) own operational reliability, disaster recovery, and the procedures to deliver it. Compliance teams audit and validate, but they don’t write the runbooks for systems they don’t operate.

The principle is simple, the team that executes at 3 AM should own the documentation, policy and procedures. That’s it.

When this boundary gets blurred, you see:

- Duplicate work and confusion

- Documentation maintained by people who don’t use it

- Territorial conflicts over ownership

- Reduced operational effectiveness

- Frustrated engineers on all sides

The solution isn’t complex:

1. Define clear organizational boundaries

2. Follow industry best practices (SRE owns operational reliability)

3. Enable collaboration without territorial behavior

4. Ensure compliance reviews operations without owning them

5. Respect that “you build it, you run it” includes documentation & policy

Until companies understand and accept where SRE naturally sits in the organization, friction is inevitable. The role overlaps boundaries by design that’s what makes it effective. The question is whether leadership can create structures that enable that rather than fight it.

To fellow SREs navigating this you’re not wrong for advocating that reliability engineering should own reliability documentation. That’s literally the job.