Sr Site Reliability Engineer

Senior Site Reliability Engineer (Contract to Hire)

Location: McKinney, TX (Hybrid, 2 3 days onsite) Must be authorized to work in the U.S.

Overview: Our client is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to lead platform reliability and traffic enforcement in a Kubernetes-hosted SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) environment. This role ensures high availability, observability, and fair multi-tenant traffic handling across distributed systems.

Key Responsibilities:

Platform Reliability & Operations

• Own uptime (target: 99.99%) and stability of multi-region Kubernetes environments.
• Architect resilient, scalable infrastructure with proactive capacity planning and automated remediation.
• Lead incident response, root cause analysis, disaster recovery, and change management.

Observability & Monitoring

• Build a full-stack observability pipeline (Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, etc.).
• Implement golden signals, tracing, and alerting to drive real-time performance insights.
• Develop automation for issue detection and resolution.

Kubernetes & Infrastructure

• Manage full Kubernetes lifecycle (upgrades, autoscaling, GitOps automation).
• Integrate and optimize OpenStack-based infrastructure beneath Kubernetes.
• Enforce security compliance, resource efficiency, and FinOps best practices.

Traffic Enforcement & Networking

• Design a Kubernetes-native traffic control layer for per-tenant/session enforcement.
• Implement CRDs, custom controllers, and service mesh (e.g., Istio, Linkerd) for dynamic policy management.
• Operate SDN telemetry agents (Cilium Hubble, WireGuard) and integrate with observability stack.

Leadership & Strategy

• Contribute to infrastructure architecture and reliability strategy.
• Mentor team members and promote Kubernetes best practices.
• Partner cross-functionally across engineering, security, and product teams.

Required Skills:

• Kubernetes in production across multi-region architectures.
• Observability tools: Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Jaeger, Loki.
• Strong Linux networking (tc, nftables, WireGuard, iptables).
• Infrastructure automation: Helm, Terraform, ArgoCD/Flux (GitOps).
• Programming: Go (preferred), Python/Bash scripting.
• Familiarity with OpenStack (Nova, Neutron, Ceph) and CNI (Cilium preferred).

Preferred Experience:

• Service mesh deployment (Istio, Linkerd), multi-cluster tools (Fleet, Rancher).
• Chaos engineering frameworks (Chaos Mesh, Litmus).
• Developer platform abstraction on Kubernetes.
• FinOps cost optimization practices.
• Edge Kubernetes and NFV/SDN background.
• Active participation in the Kubernetes community.