The pathway
How you actually get there, here
How you become one varies far more by country than what one does. This is the UK route. Most people take one of these ways in; the right one depends on where you're starting from.
- 1
From Staff/Principal Performance Engineer
3-5 years as a Staff/Principal Engineer, followed by 5-8 years in management roles.Skills to master
- Transitioning from deep technical expertise to strategic leadership, managing multiple teams, influencing cross-functional leaders, and owning large-scale initiatives.
You're ready to move on when
- Successfully led multiple complex, cross-functional performance initiatives with significant business impact.
- Demonstrated ability to mentor and develop other senior engineers and nascent leaders.
- Proven track record of influencing architectural decisions and driving technical standards across an organisation.
- Experience managing budgets and resource allocation for major programmes.
- 2
From Head of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
5-10 years leading SRE teams, including managing managers.Skills to master
- Expanding scope from SRE-specific concerns to broader performance engineering, cost optimisation, and strategic business alignment. Deepening executive communication and board interaction skills.
You're ready to move on when
- Successfully built and scaled an SRE function, significantly reducing incident rates and improving MTTR.
- Strong experience with incident command and post-mortem processes at an enterprise level.
- Proven ability to drive cultural change around operational excellence and blameless post-mortems.
- Demonstrated capability to manage large, distributed teams and foster a high-performance culture.
- 3
From Director of Engineering (with Performance Focus)
5-8 years as a Director of Engineering, with a strong portfolio in performance-critical domains.Skills to master
- Deepening specialisation in performance and reliability strategy, rather than general engineering management. Focusing on specific technical domains like observability, capacity planning, and cloud cost optimisation.
You're ready to move on when
- Managed multiple engineering teams responsible for high-traffic, performance-sensitive applications.
- Strong understanding of performance metrics, tooling, and optimisation techniques.
- Proven ability to balance feature delivery with operational stability and technical debt management.
- Experience presenting to executive leadership on technical strategy and project status.