Site Reliability Engineering originated at Google when they decided to blend aspects of software development with operations, emphasizing the reliability of the system as a primary goal. SRE teams are responsible for maintaining the uptime and performance of services while ensuring they can scale to meet demand. They employ software engineering practices to automate and improve manual processes, thus helping organizations to deliver high-quality services faster and more reliably. SRE often involves collaboration with product development teams to ensure that systems are designed with reliability and scalability in mind from the outset.