Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Our client, a leading financial services company is hiring a Senior Site Reliability Engineer on a long-term contract basis.
Job ID 83689

Work Location:
Alpharetta, GA
Summary:
We're seeking an experienced Senior Site Reliability Engineer to join our team and play a critical role in ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of our cloud infrastructure. You'll be a technical leader who combines deep operational expertise with strong automation skills to build and maintain highly available systems. As a Kubernetes expert, you'll drive our container orchestration strategy and serve as a technical authority for our platform teams.
Responsibilities:

• Design, deploy, and manage cloud infrastructure across AWS and Azure using Terraform and infrastructure-as-code principles
• Architect, deploy, and maintain production-grade Kubernetes clusters with a focus on reliability, security, and performance
• Serve as the subject matter expert on Kubernetes, providing guidance and best practices to engineering teams
• Build and maintain automated provisioning pipelines to ensure consistent, repeatable deployments
• Implement and maintain HashiCorp Vault on AWS for secrets management and security, including Vault integration with Kubernetes
• Design and implement automated High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HA/DR) capabilities through CI/CDpipelines
• Optimize cloud resources and Kubernetes workloads for performance, cost efficiency, and reliability
• Architect and implement comprehensive observability solutions using Datadog for cloud-native applications and Kubernetes infrastructure
• Build monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks for containerized workloads that provide actionable insights into system health
• Implement Kubernetes-native monitoring patterns and troubleshoot complex container orchestration issues
• Integrate Datadog with PagerDuty and other incident management platforms
• Define and track SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets to drive reliability improvements
• Create custom dashboards and monitors to track infrastructure, application, and Kubernetes cluster performance
• Design, build, and maintain robust CI/CD pipelines that enable rapid, safe deployments to Kubernetes
• Implement GitOps workflows and automated deployment strategies for containerized applications
• Implement automated testing, security scanning, and quality gates within pipelines
• Drive solutions through test, QA, and production environments with appropriate controls and safeguards
• Automate deployment strategies including blue-green, canary, and rolling deployments in Kubernetes
• Identify, assess, and remediate security vulnerabilities in infrastructure, applications, and Kubernetes clusters
• Implement Kubernetes security best practices including RBAC, pod security policies/standards, and network policies
• Collaborate with security teams to implement and maintain security best practices
• Manage and maintain HashiCorp Vault infrastructure for secure secrets management
• Ensure compliance with security policies and industry standards across all environments
• Participate in 24/7 on-call rotation to respond to critical production incidents
• Serve as Incident Commander, coordinating cross-functional response teams during major outages
• Lead post-incident reviews and drive thorough root cause analysis across engineering teams
• Troubleshoot complex Kubernetes and distributed systems issues under pressure
• Develop and refine incident response procedures and runbooks
• Partner with engineering teams to improve system reliability and performance
• Mentor junior SREs and promote SRE best practices across the organization
• Lead Kubernetes adoption efforts and educate teams on container orchestration best practices
• Drive initiatives to reduce toil through automation and process improvement
• Contribute to architectural decisions with a reliability and operability lens

Required Skills:

• 5+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or similar roles
• Expert-level knowledge of Kubernetes, including architecture, operations, and troubleshooting in production environments
• Proven track record as a go-to Kubernetes resource and technical authority
• Deep understanding of container technologies (Docker, containerd) and orchestration patterns
• AWS and Azure cloud platforms
• Terraform for infrastructure automation and management
• Datadog for monitoring, logging, and observability
• HashiCorp Vault, including deployment and management on AWS and Kubernetes integration
• Deep understanding of CI/CD pipelines, including design, implementation, and optimization for containerized workloads
• Proven ability to implement automated HA/DR solutions through CI/CD workflows
• Strong programming skills in Python for automation, tooling, and analysis
• Proven experience building observability solutions for distributed cloud applications
• Experience configuring monitoring and alerting systems and integrating with paging platforms like PagerDuty
• Demonstrated experience identifying and remediating security vulnerabilities
• Experience driving deployments through multiple environments (test/QA/production) with proper gates and controls
• Demonstrated experience participating in on-call rotations and responding to production incidents
• Experience serving as Incident Commander or leading incident response efforts
• Track record of conducting root cause analysis and driving systemic improvements
• Strong understanding of networking, security, and cloud architecture principles
• Excellent communication skills with ability to work across multiple teams and explain complex Kubernetes concepts

Preferred Skills:

• Experience with Google Cloud Platform (Google Cloud Platform) and GKE
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS)
• Experience with service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd, Consul)
• Knowledge of Helm, Kustomize, and other Kubernetes tooling
• Experience with GitOps tools (ArgoCD, Flux)
• Familiarity with additional CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, CircleCI)
• Experience with configuration management tools (Ansible, Chef, Puppet)
• Background in software engineering or systems programming
• Understanding of chaos engineering and reliability testing methodologies
• Experience with cost optimization strategies in cloud and Kubernetes environments
• Security certifications (AWS Security Specialty, CISSP, CKS, etc.)
• Experience with compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, etc.)
• Contributions to open-source Kubernetes projects or active participation in the Kubernetes community

Pay: $61-$80 per hour.