Álvaro
Data Scientist
“In a climate this uncertain, Shakers gives you a layer of reassurance and confidence. What I like most, without a doubt, is the flexibility and getting to work on top-tier projects.”
Join ShakersShakers for expert talent
Work as a Site Reliability Engineer on live platforms
Projects where reliability is yours: which SLO gets committed, what gets automated and who responds when something pages. Shakers connects you with teams whose system falls over and want to stop living that way.
What gets read about the role is either Google's book or the job ad asking for five years in eight tools. Neither tells you how to start sustaining a real team's platform project by project, on-call after on-call. Here is that.
- Higher-paying projects
- More continuity between projects
- Greater recognition for your experience
+3,000
Tech projects published on Shakers
+90
Tech, Product and Data specialisms are part of Shakers
6 months
Average length of a project with Shakers
4.7/5
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Amelia
AI Agent Developer
“I have been building AI agents for years. Thanks to Shakers I stopped chasing clients and started genuinely choosing which projects I wanted to work on. I work with some of the best companies in Europe, at my own rate, and I focus on what I am good at and what I love: building.”
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Luz
Backend Developer & Data Engineer
“Shakers adds a lot of value because it connects you with sharper projects, already filtered and better defined. It saves you a big part of the upfront work of understanding the client, quoting and weighing up whether it is worth it, and that means that as a contractor you can go far more directly to the opportunities that genuinely fit you.”
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Rubén
Software Developer
“Life as a contractor has a lot going on and it is not always easy. We like to focus on what we are good at, but you also have to manage clients, invoicing and go looking for work. For me, Shakers has been key because it does that prospecting for me, it gives the client confidence from the very first moment, and it lets us be part of a community with real enthusiasm.”
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Alejandro
AI Developer
“Shakers was key to getting my company off the ground: it gave me the flexibility to keep contracting while I built my next chapter. Without Shakers, I would have had to raise funding or push the project back.”
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Toño
Product Designer
“With Shakers I have landed recurring projects that give me peace of mind and room to grow professionally. It is not just about reaching quality clients: it is feeling that you have a network behind you, one that connects you with real opportunities and helps you move forward as a freelancer.”
Join ShakersThe decisions an SRE owns every single week
A Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) applies software engineering to operations: they set service level objectives (SLOs) with error budget, automate repetitive manual work (toil) and respond to incidents with reports that close the root cause. Kubernetes, Terraform and telemetry (Prometheus, Grafana) are their daily workshop, and the cloud is their working environment rather than an occasional one.
You decide which SLO gets committed with the business and with what error budget, which toil gets automated first, which threshold fires each alert and who responds when it pages. You also decide what the system refuses: a change without measurable rollback does not go in. The platform belongs to the team; the reliability that keeps it alive, to you.
SLOobservabilityKubernetesTerraformPrometheusGrafanaAnsibleCI/CDDockerPythonGoincident response
SLOs and error budgetsObservabilityIncident responseRoot-cause reportsToil automationKubernetes
Free to join, no hidden fees
How Shakers works for talent
Create your profile
Tell us who you are, what you can do, the projects you want to work on and what your availability and rate are.
Get your certification
We certify your experience and your use of AI so companies understand and trust what you bring.
Match with projects
We connect you with well-paid projects that fit your expertise and your preferences.
DevOps and Cloud projects that live up to your expectations
Work on real projects, with teams that need your expertise, without wasting time looking for opportunities.
Projects that fit you
Work with companies that need your stack and experience to take their projects to production.
Opportunities that come to you
Our AI matching connects your profile with the projects that fit your preferences.
You build. Shakers handles the rest
Set your own terms based on your seniority. We manage contracts, payments and paperwork.
What an SRE delivers on a Shakers project
The brief arrives with the incident
Shakers is hiring infrastructure: the project arrives with the platform that falls over and its telemetry, not with a list of technologies.
SLOs you can audit
You deliver the service objectives, their error budget and the reasoning behind each threshold, including the alert you decided not to create.
What happens when it pages
You set the runbook, the escalation and who answers in each window. On-call is designed before the first night.
Incidents told, not mocked up
Having sustained real production and being able to tell the story of an outage: what failed, what you did and what changed so it never repeated.
Automate or not
Choosing which toil dies first by impact, not fashion. Sometimes the honest answer is a simple runbook, and defending it.
Where your brief ends
You keep the system running; you don't rewrite the application or design the cloud. If the project needs pipeline or architecture, you say so at kickoff.
Frequently asked questions
Any other questions? Write to us and we will reply.
What should you learn to work as an SRE?
The vocabulary of the craft first: SLO, error budget, toil, blameless reporting. Kubernetes and Terraform after. Certification looks at real incidents you have sustained.
Which tools do you use daily?
Telemetry and dashboards every day, Kubernetes and Terraform almost always, and the client's automation language (Python and Go are the frequent ones). The cloud is the environment.
What is the difference between SRE and DevOps?
DevOps automates the path to production; the SRE keeps the system that already lives there. They cross paths constantly: many SREs come from DevOps, and the boundary is agreed per project.
How much do you earn as a freelance SRE?
You invoice per project and scope sets the band: which services the SLOs cover and whether there is on-call. At Shakers you agree the budget before accepting the brief.
Is SRE work something you can do remotely?
Almost everything: the platform lives in the cloud and on-call is organised remotely. Only the odd physical datacentre incident asks for presence.
How do you join Shakers as a certified SRE?
You create your profile, pass the certification process and enter the collective: only 4 percent make it. Then you choose which reliability projects you take on.
The daily shape of the craft
The 4 a.m. alert with its runbook, the error budget burned by mid-month and the conversation with product about shipping or stabilising. Less firefighting, more system that holds itself up.
The tools are the craft
328 active tech job ads in Spain mention site reliability and 1,040 use the SRE acronym, according to Shakers' market analysis (n=30,508, September 2026). Kubernetes, Terraform and telemetry dominate the stack job ads ask for.
How people get here
Two frequent doors: the sysadmin tired of restarting things by hand who started programming the job, and the backend developer who fell for telemetry. Both arrive with half the craft done.
What this role is not
Not the one who installs machines nor designs the cloud. If the problem is the pipeline, the role is DevOps; if it is architecture, Cloud Architect.
The roles an SRE project crosses
Four roles from the collective cross your path while you sustain a platform, from the one who deploys to the one who designs the cloud.
DevOps Engineer
Their pipeline deploys what you sustain: the classic boundary of the craft, and the way in for many SREs.
Cloud Architect
Designs the cloud whose reliability you measure: their architecture decisions are the ceiling of your SLOs.
AWS DevOps Engineer
The Amazon ecosystem specialist: when the environment is pure AWS, their pipeline and your on-call split the brief.
Backend Developer
Their services are the ones that page: when the failure comes from code, the incident report is written four-handed.
Boundaries between these roles are agreed per project: the job title doesn't set them.
Take the next step with Shakers
Want platforms that hold themselves up?
Pass Shakers certification and choose which reliability projects you take on.
