The typical SRE is a PhD in physics who realized they enjoyed hacking on the departmental cluster more than they enjoyed writing papers. Well, OK, that's a stretch but:

To a one, SREs are the smartest group of people I've met, with a ton of practical knowledge about distributed systems, a strong quantitative bent, and a desire to fix problems on live systems. If you want to call that the Ops equivalent of data scientists, fine, but I prefer think of them of scientists who study the failure of distributed systems in a live environment.