Senior Reliability Engineer

Job Title: Staff Site Reliability Engineer – Platform Engineering

Job Reference ID: 34344

Position Type: Direct Placement

Industry: Financial Services

Location: Chicago, IL (Hybrid - 2 Days Onsite/Week in Downtown Chicago)

Work Authorization: Open to candidates authorized to work in the US

About the Role

We are seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer (Platform Engineering) to serve as the foundational Technical Lead for a premier global Financial Services enterprise. In this role, you will be the primary architect and visionary for core technology foundations that underpin high-volume, ultra-low latency financial marketplaces.

You will bridge the gap between high-level business strategy and deep technical implementation, ensuring our Google Cloud Platform-native stack provides mission-critical reliability, extreme scalability, and operational excellence. Your goal is to evolve the platform from "Infrastructure as a Service" to "Reliability as a Product."

Key Responsibilities

• Technical Vision & Strategy: Define and execute the 12–18 month technical roadmap for the Platform SRE ecosystem, building high-level Internal Development Platform (IDP) abstractions in Python.

• Architectural Leadership: Serve as the final technical authority for core infrastructure architectures spanning Google Cloud Platform, GKE, and enterprise-grade Kafka messaging clusters.

• Incident Command & Resilience: Lead response strategies for complex, cross-functional outages; foster a blameless engineering culture focused on code-driven, automated resiliency.

• Reliability Governance: Standardize and enforce SLIs, SLOs, and Error Budgets across all engineering pods to safeguard system integrity.

• GenAI & Intelligent Ops: Leverage Generative AI and Agentic workflows (e.g., Gemini) to build self-healing infrastructure and automated root-cause analysis frameworks.

• Engineering Mentorship: Elevate the global SRE organization through architectural office hours, design reviews, and engineering best practices.

Required Qualifications

• Experience: 10+ years in SRE, Infrastructure, or Software Engineering roles in high-concurrency, high-availability environments.

• Leadership: 3+ years in a Staff, Principal, or Tech Lead capacity overseeing complex platform engineering domains.

• Cloud Native Mastery: Expertise in Google Cloud Platform (Networking, IAM, GKE) and scaling Kafka event buses for low-latency operations.

• Software Engineering: Expert-level proficiency in Python (and ideally Go) for writing production-grade distributed systems and custom Kubernetes operators.

• IaC & GitOps: Hands-on mastery of Terraform module design and GitOps patterns via ArgoCD.

• Location: Chicago-based or willing to relocate to Chicago (hybrid schedule requiring 2 days/week on-site).

Nice to Have

• Prior experience in Financial Markets, High-Frequency Trading (HFT), or heavily regulated financial ecosystems.

• Google Cloud Platform Professional Cloud Architect or Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA/CKAD).

• Full-Stack exposure (Node.js or modern web frameworks).