About The SRE Project
The SRE Project was founded by two engineers who believe that the best way to learn Site Reliability Engineering is through mentorship and hands-on experience-the same way one of us learned from the other.
Our Story
Sean Fretenborough has spent over 24 years working on enterprise systems, building deep expertise in reliability, automation, and large-scale infrastructure. When it came time to bring a new engineer into the fold, there was no bootcamp or certification program that could replace the value of direct mentorship.
The approach was simple: assign topics to study, discuss them, and then apply that knowledge to real enterprise systems. After a year of this guided learning, Seth Black landed a job working alongside Sean at a large enterprise. That experience proved something important-this method works.
Our Mission
We started The SRE Project to scale that mentorship model. Our mission is twofold:
- Train new SREs using the same practical, mentorship-driven approach that worked for us
- Build and share tools that solve real problems in IT automation and reliability
The Team
Sean Fretenborough - Founder
24+ years of experience in enterprise IT and systems reliability. Sean's career spans large-scale infrastructure, automation, and mentoring the next generation of engineers.
Seth Black - Co-Founder
4 years of experience, trained through direct mentorship and now working in enterprise IT. Seth brings a fresh perspective on learning SRE and what it takes to go from beginner to professional.
George Milliken - Co-Founder
25+ years building and leading engineering teams at scale. George has been a CTO, founded companies (including farm9.com, acquired by Singtel/Trustwave), and held director-level roles at HPE, CA Technologies, and CDK Global. His expertise spans database technologies, SaaS operations, and large-scale production systems. At HPE, he led a global team of 65 across 22 data centers. At CDK, he built data platform teams across the US and India. George brings hard-won lessons from the front lines of enterprise operations, including what happens when legacy systems meet crisis conditions.
Kier Fretenborough - Co-Founder
7 years at CDK Global, progressing from intern to Software Engineer. Kier started as a DBA intern in 2018 and worked his way through data science, data engineering, and full-stack development roles. His experience spans the full stack—React, Vue.js, Ruby on Rails, Spring Boot—along with AWS services, Elasticsearch, and data pipelines. He's coordinated SQL upgrades affecting 100,000 production users, built ETL pipelines integrating with Snowflake and Databricks, and trained international teams on complex codebases. Kier has also spent 4+ years building SaaS infrastructure at The SRE Project, including React portals, Stripe integrations, and AWS Lambda services.
Get in Touch
Interested in learning more about The SRE Project? Have questions about SRE or automation? We'd love to hear from you.