Senior DevOps and SRE Engineer

Role: Senior DevOps and SRE Engineer

Location: Washington, DC

Duration : Long term (Onsite)

Job Description:-

Randstad is seeking a highly experienced and technically proficient Senior DevOps and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to join our client in the DC Metro area. This critical, senior-level role is responsible for driving the reliability, performance, security, and scalability of high-availability production environments on AWS. The ideal candidate is a hands-on technical leader who blends deep expertise in software development, infrastructure-as-code, and observability to automate operational toil, lead capacity planning, and serve as a primary on-call responder for critical incidents. This role demands a strong focus on applying SRE principles (SLIs/SLOs/Error Budgets), mentoring team members, and proactively influencing cross-functional teams to achieve world-class operational excellence.

Responsibilities:-

Deployment & Automation Engineering

• Implement, maintain, and optimize robust CI/CD pipelines utilizing tools such as GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline, and Jenkins.
• Automate infrastructure provisioning and configuration management using Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, or AWS CDK.
• Design and develop automation scripts and self-service tools to significantly enhance development and operational efficiency.
• Proficiency in multiple programming languages (Python, Go, Java) to develop automation and troubleshoot applications.

Site Reliability & Observability:

• Serve as a production on-call responder, leading incident management and orchestrating critical service outages and disaster recovery failover activities.
• Facilitate detailed post-mortem meetings and drive systemic improvement patterns across teams.
• Define, monitor, and enforce Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and Error Budgets.
• Expertly leverage observability tools (Dynatrace, AppDynamics, ELK Stack, Dynatrace strongly preferred) for proactive monitoring and troubleshooting.
• Utilize distributed tracing and context propagation to identify performance bottlenecks and root causes of failures.
• Design and implement custom dashboards and anomaly detectors to generate actionable insights.

Capacity, Performance & Cost Management:

• Develop sophisticated capacity models and forecasting systems to ensure service scalability.
• Lead cost optimization initiatives, identifying and implementing efficiency gains across cloud services.
• Design and execute comprehensive Resiliency and Performance testing frameworks.
• Configure and maintain dynamic auto-scaling policies and thresholds for optimal resource utilization.

Security & Governance:

• Lead security incident investigations and execute swift remediation plans.
• Design and implement automated compliance validation and security automation frameworks.
• Drive the implementation of zero-trust architecture patterns within the cloud environment.
• Proficiently apply ITIL framework principles, preferably leveraging ITSM tools such as ServiceNow.

Qualifications Education & Experience:

• Bachelor s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 5 to 8 years of progressive experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or Platform Engineering.
• 3+ years of experience maintaining and optimizing high-availability production environments.
• Proven track record of leading complex technical initiatives from conception to completion.

Technical Expertise:

• Expert-level knowledge of at least one major cloud platform, with AWS strongly preferred.
• Deep expertise in cloud architecture, networking, and core services.
• High proficiency in IaC tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or AWS CDK.
• Expert-level experience with observability and APM tools, with a strong preference for Dynatrace.
• Proficiency in modern programming languages like Python, Go, or Java.
• Knowledge of relational, cloud-native, and NoSQL database technologies.

Professional & Leadership Skills:

• Strong leadership and mentoring capabilities, with the ability to elevate the technical skills of the team.
• Exceptional ability to influence without direct authority across engineering and product teams.
• Excellent technical writing and documentation skills (e.g., RCA development, Knowledge articles).
• Ability to maintain flexible availability for on-call duties and to work outside of standard business hours as required for incident response.