Pricefx People & Culture
At Pricefx, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) are seasoned problem-solvers. Using a range of platforms and tools, they manage a variety of customer issues and keep service delivery running smoothly. To give you an inside look at a day in the life of an SRE, we spoke with our colleague Esther, who shared her daily tasks, favorite tools, team culture, and advice for newcomers.
What a Site Reliability Engineer does at Pricefx
What does a typical day look like for an SRE at Pricefx, or does it change a lot day to day?
Every day is different, and that’s one of the unique parts of being an SRE here. Because Pricefx is a SaaS company supporting a wide range of customers, our infrastructure spans cloud environments (AWS and GCP) and bare-metal instances. So on any given day I could be doing anything from triaging resource contention on a cluster running in AWS to troubleshooting disk utilization on one of our older bare-metal partitions. We also support planned activities like upgrades, migrations, and partition copies, alongside dynamic, unplanned work such as incidents, customer escalations, and internal tool improvements.
What kinds of issues do you usually help solve?
Our work is often triggered by tickets generated through Salesforce. A substantial portion is platform upgrades, migrations, or partition copies, which involve cloning customer environments while keeping data integrity and application consistency intact. These operations can happen on both bare-metal infrastructure and Nextgen environments, so the tooling and performance considerations vary. We also handle a wider range of issues, from analyzing logs across distributed services to optimizing storage on bare metal. And when there’s an infrastructure alert, such as CPU pressure or disk saturation, we respond quickly to prevent any impact on customer SLAs.
So when a customer has an issue, support tries to resolve it first, and escalates to you if they can’t?
Yes, that’s right, especially when it’s related to infrastructure.
You’re effectively the second line of defense?
Yes. For critical or high-impact issues that need immediate attention, the support team escalates them to us for resolution. Customers can also raise tickets for updates through Salesforce, and we can proactively reach out to them when it’s time for an upgrade.
Is the work mostly solo, or is it a team effort?
When a ticket is assigned to you, you own the resolution, but that doesn’t mean you’re on your own. I’ve come to really appreciate how collaborative the SRE team is at Pricefx. We’re constantly drawing on each other’s experience. The team has deep expertise across both AWS and legacy systems, and leadership is genuinely approachable.
So you’re never truly alone with a problem?
That’s right. I take ownership of the issue, but I can always rely on my team for support. Technology evolves quickly, so a collaborative environment makes a real difference when you’re tackling complex challenges.
What part of the job do you enjoy most, and what’s the biggest challenge?
I enjoy working across complex systems, especially when I get to resolve an issue that spans multiple layers. The exposure to both traditional and cloud-native architecture gives me a broader skill set than I’d get in a cloud-only setup. The biggest challenge is also what makes the role exciting: the constantly evolving technology landscape. Supporting Next Gen means I need to stay current on Kubernetes, observability stacks, and cloud operations, while still being fluent in managing legacy workloads. It keeps me learning every day.
Learning and growth as an SRE
To stay ahead, do you have learning opportunities at work?
Definitely. We have access to Udemy, which offers a lot of technical deep-dives. I’ve taken courses on Postgres, Linux, and Kubernetes. Our Confluence documentation is well maintained too, with architecture diagrams, runbooks, and plenty of reference material. I also have regular one-on-ones with my manager where we review areas for growth or recap interesting incidents and how they were resolved. The culture encourages you to stay curious.
What’s your favorite everyday tool?
Grafana is top of the list because it gives us actionable insights and observability across both cloud-native workloads and bare-metal partitions, whether that’s CPU saturation, request latency, or service uptime. I’m also a big fan of Git. Being able to track changes in Terraform modules or Kubernetes manifests while running an upgrade gives us a strong audit trail and a rollback safety net. We also rely on internal CLI scripts for deployment automation.
With so many platforms, is it tough to switch between them?
It can be, but with the right tooling and understanding it’s manageable. Once you understand the underlying architecture, whether it’s Kubernetes or a legacy node on bare metal, you know where to look. That said, context switching between platforms takes discipline and good documentation.
What advice would you give someone starting in this role?
Don’t be afraid to ask questions. The infrastructure here is diverse, with legacy and cloud-native platforms coexisting, and it takes time to learn it all. In my first few weeks, I had a lot of support from peers and leaders, and that foundation gave me the confidence to troubleshoot production-impacting issues fairly quickly. Be proactive too. Dig into worklogs, follow the observability patterns, and learn both the old and the new stacks. It’s a great place to grow if you’re hungry to learn.
So asking for help is part of succeeding here?
Absolutely. Never hesitate to ask questions or seek guidance. The team fosters a highly supportive environment where collaboration and knowledge sharing are encouraged.
The Pricefx People and Culture team shares what life at Pricefx is really like, from hiring and career growth to wellbeing, perks, and the values we work by. When you read a Life at Pricefx story, this is who is behind it.
