Leke Ariyo embarked on a deliberate path to building a global career, saving diligently while working international roles from Lagos. His aspiration led him to graduate study abroad, aiming to enhance his skills and broaden his professional horizons. By 2022, his efforts materialized when he secured a fully funded master’s scholarship at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, Scotland, to study machine learning and deep learning. This scholarship, covering tuition and living expenses, became the crucial link that transitioned him from Nigeria into the international arena of site reliability engineering.

Ariyo's early career in Nigeria involved a dynamic interplay between software and leadership positions. He contributed to FoodCourt and co-founded Briks and EscrooVest, gaining valuable technical expertise and firsthand experience in the demanding environment of startup creation. Upon moving to the UK, he fully immersed himself in reliability engineering, a field that resonated with his technical background and forward-thinking approach.

A Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) is fundamentally responsible for designing and maintaining the foundational infrastructure of technology products. This involves building robust systems to ensure continuous operation, automating tasks that typically slow down engineers, and vigilantly monitoring signals to assess product health. Ariyo defines SRE as "building systems that let companies run smoothly and faster," emphasizing the dual goals of improving timing and reducing manual toil through automation. Key aspects of the role include ensuring security, availability, and overall system functionality for users worldwide. It represents a balanced integration of software engineering and operations, often facilitated by distributed teams, allowing engineers in locations like Lagos or Accra to manage production systems globally.

Despite a decline in demand for SREs since its peak in 2023, the role remains critical for numerous companies. While the tech industry has seen a rise in demand for AI expertise and specific tech infrastructure roles, firms in Europe and the US continue to hire SREs, ranging from startups processing thousands of transactions to Big Tech giants handling billions. Ariyo’s entry into the UK job market after his master's was serendipitous. A networking event in Glasgow, where he shared his CV, led to an unexpected callback weeks later, culminating in interviews and a job offer at a global financial institution. He also holds a membership with the British Computer Society (BCS).

Ariyo underscores the immense opportunities within the field, stating, "Reliability is a global need, and once people see that you can distinguish yourself, they will value you no matter where you are." The work of an SRE encompasses both routine tasks, such as setting up automation, optimizing cloud costs, and tuning systems for efficiency, and unpredictable challenges, like managing production incidents that threaten customer satisfaction and revenue. Maintaining calmness under pressure is paramount during such critical events, as "when automation cannot save you, you are the one who must." This ability to think clearly amidst crises is highly valued by firms, leading to significant demand for experienced reliability engineers, including offers with relocation from major global technology companies like Amazon.

For aspiring SREs, Ariyo stresses the importance of a well-defined plan and the acquisition of specific skills. Foundational knowledge in Linux, networking, and a chosen cloud platform is essential. Beyond these basics, engineers must practice by deploying real systems, containerizing them, and establishing effective monitoring solutions. He humorously recommends intentionally breaking systems in controlled environments to simulate outages and practice recovery, preparing engineers for high-stakes operational failures. This practical experience, combined with a mindset focused on scalability – designing systems for millions of users rather than hundreds – differentiates a reliability engineer. Self-paced learning can take up to a year for individuals with a strong engineering background to become mildly skilled SREs. Ariyo advises seeking entry-level positions like cloud support engineer or junior DevOps roles, suggesting platforms such as Wellfound for opportunities.

Ariyo's entrepreneurial past in Nigeria, including co-founding EscrooVest—an escrow platform that gained 20,000 users before facing regulatory shutdown—shaped his convictions about building. Despite the setback, he developed a strong belief that early-stage startups should prioritize reliability as a core investment from day one, rather than an afterthought. He advocates allocating 5–15% of initial spend to observability, utilizing lean, open-source tools like Prometheus and Grafana before investing in more expensive solutions. His philosophy centers on clarity regarding critical business metrics and user flows, avoiding excessive data noise. He has observed many startups rushing to implement features while neglecting monitoring, an approach he believes ultimately incurs higher costs. His advice is to maintain simple observability, focus on essential signals, and directly link them to business performance indicators like payment success rates or login flow tracking.

Living and working in the UK has intensified Ariyo's desire to build, making him more cautious and deliberate. His future projects aim for global applicability, with designs that proactively address potential risks. Through mentorships and professional networks, he now guides other engineers entering the SRE field, emphasizing that reliability deserves a foundational role in any product development strategy. This discipline has granted him mobility, deep technical expertise, and a robust philosophy of building that he champions in every discussion about the future of technology, distinguishing products that thrive at scale from those that falter under pressure.