Job Description
Position Title: Site Reliability Engineer (Staff-Level)
Engagement Type: W2 / C2C
Location: Remote
Role Overview
We are seeking a Staff-level Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to provide technical and strategic leadership for large-scale, enterprise cloud migration initiatives. This role will serve as a trusted authority on reliability, infrastructure adjacency, and AWS migration strategy, partnering closely with engineering, platform, security, finance, and executive stakeholders to drive informed, business-aligned decisions.
The ideal candidate brings deep experience evaluating complex on-prem to AWS migrations, challenging architectural assumptions, and translating technical risk into business-relevant insights.
Key Responsibilities Technical & Strategic Leadership
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Act as a staff-level technical authority for reliability engineering, infrastructure strategy, and cloud migration initiatives.
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Provide principled, data-driven guidance on migration approaches, including rehost, replatform, refactor, retire, and retain (6Rs) across a diverse application portfolio.
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Constructively challenge architectural and migration assumptions to ensure alignment with long-term business, operational, and reliability objectives.
Migration Plan Assessment & Optimization
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Lead in-depth technical reviews of proposed migration plans, identifying:
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Architectural risks and hidden or implicit dependencies
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Cost inefficiencies and total cost of ownership (TCO) drivers
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Timeline risks related to sequencing, coupling, or organizational constraints
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Propose alternative migration strategies that improve cost efficiency, delivery speed, reliability, or a combination thereof.
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Establish and promote standards and best practices for migration readiness, dependency analysis, and plan validation.
Application & Dependency Intelligence
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Analyze complex application ecosystems and shared platform dependencies across on-premises and AWS environments.
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Identify opportunities for application decomposition, consolidation, or modernization to improve reliability and migration velocity.
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Drive clarity around infrastructure adjacency (databases, messaging, identity, networking, shared services) and its impact on migration sequencing and risk.
Business-Centric Advisory
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Translate technical assessments into clear, business-relevant insights for engineering leadership, product teams, and executive stakeholders.
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Quantify tradeoffs and risks in terms of cost, delivery timelines, and operational impact.
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Influence funding, prioritization, and sequencing decisions through credible and data-backed technical analysis.
Reliability & Operational Readiness
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Evaluate post-migration operating models, including observability, resiliency, automation, incident response, and overall SRE maturity.
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Ensure reliability objectives are realistically reflected in AWS architecture designs and service selection.
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Advocate for pragmatic reliability investments aligned with application criticality and business value.
Cross-Organizational Influence
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Partner with product, platform, security, finance, and portfolio leadership to drive aligned and scalable migration decisions.
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Mentor senior and mid-level engineers on systems thinking, dependency analysis, and business-aware SRE practices.
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Represent the SRE perspective in architecture review boards, migration governance forums, and executive-level discussions.
Required Skills & Experience Technical Experience
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8+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure, or cloud architecture roles, operating at a Staff or equivalent level.
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Proven experience leading or assessing large-scale, enterprise on-premises to AWS migrations.
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Deep expertise in:
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Distributed systems and multi-tier application architectures
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On-prem infrastructure (compute, storage, networking, virtualization)
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AWS services, architectures, design patterns, and tradeoffs at scale
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Strong ability to reason about application dependencies, failure domains, and systemic risk.
Strategic & Business Acumen
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Demonstrated ability to influence architectural and migration decisions at scale without direct authority.
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Comfortable challenging plans and priorities in a constructive, executive-ready manner.
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Strong analytical skills with experience evaluating cost models, delivery risk, and operational tradeoffs.
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Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to translate complex technical concepts into business terms.
Preferred Qualifications
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Experience operating as a Staff or Principal Engineer in a matrixed enterprise organization.
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Familiarity with the AWS Well-Architected Framework, AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF), and structured migration methodologies.
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Exposure to FinOps or cloud financial management practices.
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Experience defining standards, review processes, or governance models for cloud migration at scale.
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Background working with regulated, mission-critical, or highly available enterprise systems.