To differentiate a true SRE role from a regular operations or support job, look for these clues:

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1. Mentions of automation and programming skills (e.g., scripting, Python, Go, Terraform).

2. Ownership of SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets.

3. Involvement in building monitoring, alerting, and observability systems.

4. Responsibilities including incident response, postmortems, and RCA.

5. Focus on reducing toil through engineering solutions, not just manual firefighting.

6. Collaboration with development teams to ensure reliability.

7. Use of modern cloud or container orchestration technologies.

8. Emphasis on continuous improvement of reliability and scalability.