Site Reliability Engineer

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Site Reliability Engineer based in the United States.

Take ownership of the reliability, performance, and scalability of production systems supporting complex digital platforms and AI-powered applications. In this hands-on role, you will work alongside developers, platform engineers, and operations teams to build resilient infrastructure and prevent incidents before they affect users. You will oversee reliability across AWS infrastructure and Python backend services, establishing observability practices, service-level objectives, and effective incident response processes. Through automation, performance optimization, and continuous improvement, you will help teams move from reactive troubleshooting to proactive reliability engineering. You will also contribute to technical strategy, document operational best practices, and mentor engineers as the SRE function expands. This remote contract opportunity is ideal for an experienced reliability professional who enjoys solving challenging infrastructure problems and making a measurable impact on system availability and operational efficiency.

Accountabilities:

As Site Reliability Engineer, you will own critical aspects of production reliability, from infrastructure monitoring and incident management to automation, capacity planning, and engineering collaboration. Your responsibilities will include:

• Reliability engineering and observability: Design, implement, and maintain comprehensive observability systems covering metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and monitoring strategies aligned with business needs.

• Service-level objectives: Define and maintain service-level objectives (SLOs), service-level agreements (SLAs), and error budgets to establish clear reliability standards for backend services.

• Incident response and on-call support: Participate in a 24/7 Priority 0 (P0) on-call rotation, meeting a 10-minute acknowledgment service-level agreement. Validate and escalate AI-generated incident reports to the appropriate platform teams.

• Incident investigation: Troubleshoot production incidents, perform root-cause analysis, lead or contribute to postmortems, and implement corrective actions that reduce recurrence.

• AWS infrastructure management: Maintain and improve production infrastructure using AWS services such as Application Load Balancer (ALB), ECS/Fargate, RDS Aurora, Lambda, and IAM.

• Backend reliability: Debug, optimize, and improve Python services running in containers and serverless environments, focusing on availability, latency, throughput, and resource efficiency.

• Automation and toil reduction: Develop self-healing mechanisms and operational automation that reduce manual work, improve consistency, and increase engineering productivity.

• Performance and capacity planning: Analyze observability data to identify bottlenecks, forecast capacity requirements, optimize resource utilization, and improve system performance.

• Infrastructure and deployment practices: Review infrastructure changes and improve infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and release strategies.

• Reliability integration: Collaborate with development, security, platform, and operations teams to integrate reliability and observability throughout the software delivery lifecycle.

• AI workload operations: Support AI applications and services by addressing their operational requirements, reliability risks, and scaling needs.

• Technical documentation: Create and maintain runbooks, architecture documentation, troubleshooting guides, and operational procedures that enable teams to resolve issues independently.

• Technical leadership and mentoring: Help onboard and mentor additional SRE engineers as the team grows from approximately four engineers to a target of 8–12.

• Client and leadership collaboration: Participate in discovery workshops, regular working sessions, architecture reviews, and technical discussions, advising stakeholders on reliability trade-offs and operational strategy.

• Knowledge sharing: Document solutions, contribute to internal knowledge bases, pair program on complex challenges, and promote consistent reliability practices across teams.

Requirements:

The ideal candidate brings substantial hands-on experience in reliability, DevOps, or platform engineering, combined with strong software troubleshooting skills and the ability to collaborate effectively in distributed teams. The following qualifications are required:

• At least 6 years of hands-on experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or Platform Engineering in production environments at scale.

• Deep expertise in AWS, including ALB, ECS/Fargate, RDS Aurora, Lambda, and IAM.

• Production-level Python backend engineering experience, including debugging and optimizing services deployed in containers and serverless environments.…