Site Reliability Engineer β†’ AI Engineer

SRE to AI Engineer: From Reliability to AI Systems

Transition from Site Reliability Engineering to AI Engineering by leveraging your deep expertise in system reliability, observability, and infrastructure automation. As an SRE, you already understand the critical principles that make AI systems production-ready: SLO-driven thinking translates directly to AI quality metrics, your monitoring expertise becomes the foundation for ML observability, and your Kubernetes knowledge accelerates model serving deployments. The shift from traditional reliability to AI reliability is more natural than it appears, you're essentially applying your battle-tested operational mindset to a new class of workloads. Your incident response skills become invaluable when debugging model drift, hallucinations, and latency spikes in inference pipelines. This path focuses on understanding ML fundamentals through an operational lens, building robust model serving infrastructure, implementing AI-specific observability, and developing end-to-end MLOps practices. By the end, you'll architect AI systems that are not just functional but production-grade: observable, scalable, and reliable. Timeline: 4-6 months.

4-6 months
Difficulty: Intermediate

Prerequisites

  • Production monitoring and observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog)
  • Kubernetes and container orchestration
  • Python or Go programming proficiency
  • Incident response and on-call experience
  • SLO/SLI/SLA definition and management
  • Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi)

Your Learning Path

2

ML Systems Reliability & Infrastructure

3-4 weeks

Skills You'll Build

GPU scheduling and resource management in K8sModel artifact storage and versioningTraining job orchestration (Kubeflow, Ray)Cost optimization for ML workloadsSLOs for ML systems (latency, throughput, accuracy)
3

Model Serving & Inference Infrastructure

3-4 weeks

Skills You'll Build

Model serving frameworks (TensorFlow Serving, Triton, vLLM)Autoscaling inference workloadsA/B testing and canary deployments for modelsCaching strategies for inferenceLoad balancing across model replicas
4

AI Observability & Monitoring

3-4 weeks

Skills You'll Build

ML-specific metrics (latency percentiles, token throughput)Model drift detection and alertingPrompt and response logging at scaleDistributed tracing for AI pipelinesCost tracking and attribution for LLM usage
6

MLOps & Platform Engineering

2-3 weeks

Skills You'll Build

CI/CD for ML modelsFeature stores and data pipelinesModel registry and governanceReproducibility and experiment trackingMulti-environment deployment strategies