Senior Site Reliability Engineer/Contractor/ Kubernetes & Middleware Platforms

Senior Site Reliability Engineer/Contractor Kubernetes & Middleware Platforms

Location: Jersey City, NJ (100% Onsite)

Role Overview:

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, you ll bring software engineering practices to operations - building the reliability framework, defining Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and automating toil away. You ll own the health and performance of container platforms (EKS & OpenShift), Middleware Platforms (Kafka, Redis), and the CI/CD/observability pipelines that power modern, distributed applications.

Key Responsibilities:

• Platform Operations:
• Administer and optimize Kubernetes clusters - Amazon EKS and Red Hat OpenShift
• Manage platform lifecycle, upgrades, scaling, and security controls
• Middleware Management:
• Operate and tune event platforms like Apache Kafka
• Administer in-memory data stores like Redis Enterprise Clusters
• Administer and maintain 3 Scale API Gateway platform.
• Automation:
• Fine tune Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) pipelines and platform components
• Automate manual operations through IaC & configuration management tools/platforms.
• Observability & Instrumentation:
• Design and implement monitoring dashboards and alerts with Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, and Splunk
• Instrument Java, Node.js, and Python distributes apps - embed tracing, metrics, and logs at code-level to meet SLOs.
• Reliability Engineering:
• Define SLIs/SLOs and manage error budgets- use data-driven insights to balance reliability and feature velocity.
• Lead on-call rotations, incident response, and conduct blameless root cause analysis to drive continuous improvement.
• Performance & Capacity:
• Forecast and right-size resource usage across clusters and middleware
• Profile and tune application performance (CPU, memory, threading) in production.

Required Skills & Qualifications:

• 12+ years of overall industry experience.
• 6+ years in SRE, DevOps, Platform, or Production Engineering roles.
• EKS and/or OpenShift administration certification (CKA, AWS Certified Kubernetes Administrator, Red Hat Certified OpenShift Administrator, or equivalent).
• Hands-on with Kubernetes internals, networking, Helm charts, and Operators.
• Middleware expertise: Deploying, scaling, and securing Kafka and Redis clusters.
• Strong IaC toolchain experience: Helm, ArgoCD, Terraform, Ansible or equivalent tools/platforms
• Observability mastery: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Splunk or equivalent tools/platforms.
• Enforce container security and policy governance using tools like OPA/Gatekeeper, Kyverno, and scanners such as Trivy, Clair, and Snyk, integrated with CI/CD and admission controls for automated compliance.
• Implement Kubernetes network segmentation using NetworkPolicy and/or Calico, ensuring secure east-west traffic and minimizing blast radius to protect service reliability.
• Programming/scripting proficiency in Python, Shell Scripting, Groovy or similar automation scripting.
• Demonstrable experience instrumenting distributed applications (Java, Node.js, Python) with metrics, logs, and tracing libraries.
• Proven track record of running large-scale production systems with minimal downtime.
• Strong analytical, debugging, communication, and collaboration skills.

Nice-to-Have:

• Service mesh experience (Istio, Linkerd).
• Chaos engineering foundations (Chaos Monkey, LitmusChaos).
• Familiarity with security/compliance in regulated environments.
• Experienced with any API Gateway platform (e.g. RedHat 3 Scale API Gateway).

What Makes This Role Unique:

• You ll be the architect of reliability guardrails - building automation and pipelines that free developers and engineers from manual ops.
• You ll define and enforce SLO-driven releases, leveraging error budgets to strike the right balance between innovation and uptime.
• You ll own end-to-end instrumentation: from container runtime metrics through Kafka-backed event flows to application-level traces in code.

Consulting Details:

• Duration: Contract (TBD)
• Location: Jersey City, NJ (Onsite)