How SREs Can Act as Internal DevEx Advocates

Developer Experience (DevEx) is no longer a soft metric — it’s a strategic advantage. But who in the organisation owns it? While product and platform teams often take the lead, there's an unsung hero uniquely positioned to champion meaningful DevEx improvements: the Site Reliability Engineer (SRE).

SREs already live at the intersection of infrastructure and engineering. They work across development, operations, and security, and they understand the daily friction developers face when building and delivering software. In today’s complex, fast-paced environments, this makes them powerful DevEx advocates from within.

Let’s explore how SREs can step into this role and how tools like Agile Analytics help bridge the gap between operational excellence and developer happiness.

At first glance, SRE and DevEx might seem like two separate disciplines. But when you dig deeper, their goals align:

• SRE focuses on system reliability, uptime, and reducing operational toil.

• DevEx focuses on developer satisfaction, productivity, and reducing cognitive load.

These are two sides of the same coin.

SREs care about error budgets, alert fatigue, and system resilience — all of which affect how developers work. They witness the cost of unclear ownership, broken CI/CD pipelines, and flaky deployments. When developers are blocked or burned out, systems suffer. When systems are brittle, developers get stuck in operational chaos.

This means SREs are uniquely positioned to:

• Spot workflow inefficiencies

• Identify high-friction tooling

• Recommend automation opportunities

• Advocate for reliability-focused improvements that benefit developers

SREs manage alerts daily. They can help tune noisy systems and remove non-actionable alerts, creating calmer on-call rotations and fewer interruptions for developers.

Build failures and flaky deploys kill productivity. SREs can optimise pipelines, add guardrails, and work with platform teams to make deployments smooth and safe.

Developers often write code blindly, with no feedback on how it behaves in production. SREs can expose SLIs and error budgets, offering clear visibility into reliability trade-offs and release impacts.

SREs can help standardize tooling and environments, reducing setup time and context switching — key DevEx pain points.

Empathy is a good start, but real change comes from data-driven DevEx improvement. That’s where Agile Analytics makes a difference.

Agile Analytics connects reliability metrics (like lead time, incident frequency, and error budgets) with real-time developer feedback. It helps SREs and engineering leaders:

• Identify bottlenecks in the development lifecycle

• Correlate DevEx scores with operational data

• Track how changes in tooling or process affect developer satisfaction

• Prioritise work that improves both system reliability and developer productivity

This evidence-based approach moves DevEx conversations from anecdotal to actionable. It gives SREs the language and data they need to drive meaningful change.

SREs don’t need to solve DevEx alone. Instead, they can lead the charge by:

• Collaborating with developer experience teams to highlight operational pain points

• Bringing platform and infrastructure insights into DevEx design conversations

• Advocating for user-friendly tooling, observability, and feedback loops

• Working with Agile Analytics to track the impact of initiatives on team satisfaction and reliability

By treating developers as users — and developer experience as a reliability metric — SREs can help create a culture where system health and human well-being are not competing priorities, but aligned outcomes.

In 2025, great engineering cultures are not built on heroic firefighting or raw velocity. They're built on clarity, reliability, and empowered developers.

SREs are already deeply embedded in the systems that developers use every day. By stepping into the role of DevEx advocate — and using tools like Agile Analytics to guide the way — they can help build better platforms, happier teams, and more resilient systems.

Because when developers thrive, systems do too.