Senior Site Reliability Engineer (For Independent Contractors)

Details

Senior Site Reliability Engineers treat operations as a software problem, focusing on the reliability of systems and services, including availability, performance, scalability, latency, observability, and efficiency. The role involves maintaining key components and developing systems that reduce manual labor through automation, improve system reliability, and decouple operational toil from system size and complexity.

The Senior SRE I is responsible for designing, prioritizing, and implementing complex technical solutions; estimating effort and impact; leading incident response; and delivering high-quality engineering work. The role also includes coaching and mentoring less experienced engineers and promoting best practices within the team.

Responsibilities

Building Software Applications

• Build software applications using relevant development languages and appropriate systems, services, and tools.
• Guide junior team members in software development practices.
• Refactor and simplify code by introducing design patterns where appropriate.
• Ensure application quality through standard testing techniques and methods aligned with the test strategy.
• Write readable and reusable code using standard patterns and libraries.
• Maintain data security, integrity, and quality in accordance with company standards and best practices.

Software Systems Design

• Evaluate architecture solutions based on cost, business requirements, technology requirements, and emerging technologies.
• Assess the implications of changing or adding systems by maintaining a broad understanding of infrastructure and system architecture.
• Apply engineering techniques such as prototyping, spiking, and vendor evaluation to accelerate software development and support business needs.
• Design solutions that meet current requirements and support future enhancements.

End-to-End System Ownership

• Own services end to end by monitoring application health and performance and setting and reviewing relevant metrics.
• Reduce business continuity risks and bus factor through modern practices, appropriate tools, and documentation such as runbooks and OpDocs.
• Use continuous delivery and experimentation frameworks to reduce risk and obtain customer feedback.
• Independently manage applications and services through deployment and production operations.
• Maintain data security, integrity, and quality according to company standards and best practices.

Technical Incident Management

• Address and resolve live production issues while mitigating customer impact within SLA.
• Improve system reliability through root cause analysis and long-term solutions.
• Contribute to incident tracking, postmortems, and live issue logging.

Automation, Monitoring, and Reliability Improvements

• Keep infrastructure current by reducing technical debt, identifying bottlenecks, and preparing for scaling.
• Reduce operational and maintenance costs through new technologies, automation, and vendor partnerships.
• Develop software features that address availability, scalability, latency, and efficiency.
• Monitor production systems and network infrastructure using observability metrics, business KPIs, and capacity planning.
• Partner with development teams to establish appropriate application observability metrics.

Additional Responsibilities

• Apply critical thinking to identify patterns, underlying issues, and solutions in complex situations.
• Identify and implement process, system, and structural improvements.
• Communicate clearly with stakeholders and work toward mutually agreeable solutions.
• Provide architectural guidance to product teams and help align technical capabilities with target architecture improvements.
• Coach, guide, and support colleagues and stakeholders by sharing experience, knowledge, and effective working approaches.

Requirements

• Experience working in a high-volume, high-skill environment.
• High ownership and ability to work independently.
• Timely and clear communication skills.
• Experience with Java and CI/CD.
• Experience with Terraform.
• Experience with AWS and Kafka.
• Experience with Grafana and Prometheus.