Site Reliability Engineer (For Independent Contractors)

Details

Staff augmentation role supporting a strategic shift in how ADS runs its managed data services. The position focuses on moving DynamoDB from a decentralised operating model to a governed model with cross-account IAM, a fleet control plane, and self-service capabilities.

This is a hands-on platform engineering role rather than a traditional ticket-driven operations SRE position. The engineer will own production systems, understand their behaviour at scale, automate operational work, and improve the platform.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate highly available NoSQL infrastructure and platform services, primarily around DynamoDB.
• Build governed-model capabilities, including cross-account IAM roles, module rollout tooling, live estate inventory, SOx evidence collection, and break-glass access.
• Develop reusable Terraform modules and software-engineering-grade automation.
• Operate workloads across multiple AWS accounts and environments.
• Work with AWS IAM, VPC and networking, EC2, KMS, CloudWatch, and multi-account organisation tooling.
• Automate provisioning, configuration, upgrades, remediation, and routine operational tasks.
• Improve observability, alerting, incident response, SLOs, and operational readiness.
• Diagnose production issues across applications, databases, Linux, networking, and AWS.
• Contribute to migrations and modernisation initiatives.
• Build self-service capabilities and standardised interfaces for internal engineering teams consuming NoSQL services.
• Participate in design, implementation, code review, testing, deployment, and production support.

Requirements

• 3 to 5 years of production experience building or running distributed systems at meaningful scale.
• Strong AWS experience, including IAM, VPC and networking, EC2, monitoring, and multi-account environments.
• Strong Terraform or equivalent Infrastructure-as-Code experience.
• Python experience at a software-engineering level; Go or Java is also acceptable.
• Strong Linux and production troubleshooting skills.
• Experience with observability, incident response, and SRE practices for critical services.
• Demonstrated preference for automating operational workflows instead of relying on manual procedures.
• Hands-on experience with at least one production NoSQL or distributed data system, such as DynamoDB, Cassandra, ScyllaDB, a wide-column store, or a distributed key-value store.
• Full overlap with Netherlands business hours.

Preferred Qualifications

• In-depth DynamoDB experience, including data modelling, single-table design, partitioning, hot-key behaviour, on-demand and provisioned capacity, GSI and LSI, Streams, Global Tables, PITR, and backup and restore operational patterns.
• Agentic SDLC experience, including AI-assisted software engineering, coding agents, or AI-agent-based automation across development, testing, review, deployment, incident response, or operational workflows.
• Experience building internal platforms or self-service infrastructure for engineering teams.
• Experience with large-scale migrations or infrastructure modernisation.
• Experience replacing manual operations with APIs, controllers, or automated workflows.
• Kubernetes experience.
• Experience designing highly available services across regions or availability zones.

Profile

The successful candidate is comfortable working across software engineering, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and production operations. They can independently work through ambiguous infrastructure problems, understand how systems behave in production, and leave systems more automated and easier to operate.

Logistics

• 40 hours per week, 8 hours per day.
• Remote; nearshore candidates are welcome.
• Full overlap with Netherlands business hours is required.
• Start as early as possible.
• The first contract is scheduled to end in 2026, with the option to extend.
• Reports to the ADS NoSQL hiring manager.