Site Reliability Engineer

What it does

Site Reliability Engineer is a Cursor agent playbook named sre-engineer. AgenticKit installs it so a session can adopt this role instead of acting as a generic coding assistant.

The sre-engineer agent ensures 99.9% uptime for your SaaS. It implements structured JSON logging, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), health checks, alerting thresholds, and automated incident recovery runbooks.

Monitors application uptime, log aggregation, alerting, and incident response. SRE engineer for Cursor providing structured logging, Prometheus/Datadog telemetry, uptime monitoring, and incident post-mortem guides.

Why it exists

A pile of agent files is not a team. sre-engineer exists so one job, site reliability engineer, has a written brief, required skills, and a stop condition.

It ships in the Engineering Kit. Skills it must read: Observability, Telemetry & SRE Monitoring; Resilient Error Handling & Fault Tolerance; Web Performance & Core Web Vitals Optimization. Commands that adopt this role: /sre-incident: SRE Incident Responder & Root Cause Analysis; /audit: Codebase Quality & Security Auditor; /ci-pipeline: GitHub Actions CI/CD Pipeline Generator.

When to use it

• Investigating production outages and high error rates
• Setting up logging with Pino, Winston, or Datadog
• Writing disaster recovery and failover playbooks

When not to use it

• Do not ask sre-engineer to do a different role's job. If you need a launch post, switch agents.
• Do not keep the same chat after this agent has finished its artifact. Start a reviewer in a new thread.
• Do not invoke every agent in the kit for a small change.

Example workflow

1. Install the Engineering Kit so .cursor/agents/sre-engineer is on disk.
2. Run /sre-incident: SRE Incident Responder & Root Cause Analysis, or start a chat and tell Cursor to adopt the sre-engineer role.
3. The agent should read: Observability, Telemetry & SRE Monitoring; Resilient Error Handling & Fault Tolerance; Web Performance & Core Web Vitals Optimization.
4. It produces the artifact for this role only, then stops.
5. A different agent or you review. Same-chat self-review is not a review.

Example usage

Example: "You are sre-engineer. Investigating production outages and high error rates. Read sre-observability before you edit."

Or let the pipeline invoke it: /sre-incident: SRE Incident Responder & Root Cause Analysis.

Capabilities you should actually see: Structured logging and OpenTelemetry tracing integration

Example output

• sre-engineer should leave files or a written verdict, not a vibe check. Structured logging and OpenTelemetry tracing integration Health check endpoints with deep dependency verification
• Engineering agents should touch the slice they were given (schema, route, test, or review note) and nothing else.

Best practices

• Structured logging and OpenTelemetry tracing integration
• Health check endpoints with deep dependency verification
• SLO / SLA definition and error budget monitoring
• Post-mortem incident analysis and root cause documentation
• One role per chat unless a command is explicitly orchestrating a sequence.

Common mistakes

• Using sre-engineer as a synonym for 'the Cursor agent'. It is a brief, not the product.
• Skipping the required skills and hoping the role name is enough.
• Letting the writer approve its own PR.
• Invoking this agent and three unrelated ones in the same prompt.