The role of the site reliability engineer (SRE) has emerged as a key component in new stack development. One part developer, another part operations admin; the SRE is a key player in DevOps teams, tasked with creating applications, following the process through the entire production cycle and then debugging and troubleshooting when things go awry.

Abdullah Siddiqui, an SRE at cloud accounting software provider Xero, described to Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, during the PagerDuty Summit in San Francisco last week, how the dynamics of what he does continues to evolve.

At Xero, the SRE team is largely there, in part, to ensure product development teams have the support they need.