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Performance review template for a devops / site reliability engineer
A ready-to-use, section-by-section template with the competencies that matter for a devops / site reliability engineer, role-specific example phrases, and a guard against the stock filler that makes most reviews read as generic. Copy the structure, fill in your evidence, or skip the writing entirely with Crestento.
The template
Four sections, in this order. Length should match the evidence you have — a thin section is honest; an invented paragraph is not.
Summary
One or two paragraphs setting the context: what was expected of devops / site reliability engineer this period, and your overall verdict. Lead with the headline.
Example phrasing
“Held all owned services within SLO across the year (zero error-budget exhaustion), cut average deploy time from 22 minutes to 4 through pipeline refactoring, led the post-mortem for the Q3 networking outage, and shipped the alert-noise reduction that cut paging volume by 60%.”
Strengths
The behaviours and outcomes that made the work happen. Anchor in evidence: SLO adherence and error-budget consumption, MTTR (mean time to recovery) on incidents, change-failure rate on deploys.
- Evidence for: service reliability (SLO ownership, error-budget management).
- Evidence for: incident response and post-mortem rigor.
- Evidence for: infrastructure as code (Terraform, Pulumi, etc.).
- Evidence for: CI/CD pipeline ownership.
Areas for Growth
Forward-looking development edges. Frame as opportunities, not deficiencies. Specific behaviours to develop, not generic devops / site reliability engineer criticism.
- One pattern observed across the period.
- One specific behaviour to develop.
- One concrete next step.
Goals for the Next Period
Two or three concrete goals. Each should name a specific behaviour change, a measurable target, and a deadline. Avoid vague aspirations.
Competencies to evaluate
The 7 competencies a strong devops / site reliability engineer review structures around, in priority order. Use these as the spine of the Strengths and Areas for Growth sections.
- service reliability (SLO ownership, error-budget management)
- incident response and post-mortem rigor
- infrastructure as code (Terraform, Pulumi, etc.)
- CI/CD pipeline ownership
- observability (logging, metrics, tracing)
- automation and toil reduction
- security and compliance partnership
Before you write
SRE work is mostly invisible — the systems run, the deploys succeed, the alerts are quiet. The differentiation between strong and weak SREs is in the systems they BUILD to keep things invisible (good observability, low-toil automation, error-budget discipline) and in how they handle incidents when things break (clean incident command, blameless post-mortems, durable preventive actions). A review that only counts incidents will misread SREs whose systems prevent incidents from happening in the first place.
Evidence to gather
Strong reviews for a devops / site reliability engineer cite evidence of these shapes. Only use a specific value (a percentage, a count, a dollar amount) if you actually have it — don’t invent a number to sound concrete.
- SLO adherence and error-budget consumption
- MTTR (mean time to recovery) on incidents
- change-failure rate on deploys
- deploy frequency and deploy duration
- alert noise / page volume trend
- toil hours per week (target trending down)
- infrastructure cost trend
Where to find the evidence
Work products a devops / site reliability engineer produces. Reference these by name in the review when they’re relevant — it signals you know the work.
- post-mortems they wrote or facilitated
- infrastructure-as-code commits
- runbooks for owned services
- SLO / SLI definitions and dashboards
- CI / CD pipeline configurations
- alert / paging policy documents
- capacity / cost-planning analysis
Phrasing that lands vs phrasing that doesn’t
Strong — specific, evidenced, role-appropriate
“Held all owned services within SLO across the year (zero error-budget exhaustion), cut average deploy time from 22 minutes to 4 through pipeline refactoring, led the post-mortem for the Q3 networking outage, and shipped the alert-noise reduction that cut paging volume by 60%.”
Weak — vague, unevidenced, generic
“Strong DevOps engineer.”
Phrases to never use
Stock filler that AI-written devops / site reliability engineer reviews slip into. Managers spot it instantly. Rewrite to name a specific behaviour instead.
- “strong DevOps engineer”
- “go-to person for production”
- “drives reliability”
- “passionate about reliability”
- “trusted to keep things running”
- “raises the operational bar”
- “consistently delivers stability”
Don’t invent these specifics
The details an AI tends to fabricate for devops / site reliability engineerreviews. If you don’t have the specific number, name, or date in your notes, leave it out — generic-but-honest beats specific-but- invented every time.
- specific SLO percentages or error-budget numbers not in input
- named services owned when not mentioned
- specific MTTR / deploy-time numbers not provided
- named tooling adoptions (Terraform, k8s) not in input
- specific incidents led when only counts were given
- particular cost-savings figures not referenced
Skip the template, generate the review
Drop your bullet points into Crestento and it produces the polished draft using this exact template structure, tuned for a devops / site reliability engineer. Two reviews free, no card.
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