Site Reliability Engineer

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

• Act as a staff-level technical authority for reliability engineering, infrastructure strategy, and cloud migration initiatives.

• Provide principled, data-driven guidance on migration approaches, including rehost, replatform, refactor, retire, and retain (6Rs) across a diverse application portfolio.

• Constructively challenge architectural and migration assumptions to ensure alignment with long-term business, operational, and reliability objectives.

Migration Plan Assessment & Optimization

• Lead in-depth technical reviews of proposed migration plans, identifying:

  • Architectural risks and hidden or implicit dependencies

  • Cost inefficiencies and total cost of ownership (TCO) drivers

  • Timeline risks related to sequencing, coupling, or organizational constraints

• Propose alternative migration strategies that improve cost efficiency, delivery speed, reliability, or a combination thereof.

• Establish and promote standards and best practices for migration readiness, dependency analysis, and plan validation.

Application & Dependency Intelligence

• Analyze complex application ecosystems and shared platform dependencies across on-premises and AWS environments.

• Identify opportunities for application decomposition, consolidation, or modernization to improve reliability and migration velocity.

• Drive clarity around infrastructure adjacency (databases, messaging, identity, networking, shared services) and its impact on migration sequencing and risk.

Business-Centric Advisory

• Translate technical assessments into clear, business-relevant insights for engineering leadership, product teams, and executive stakeholders.

• Quantify tradeoffs and risks in terms of cost, delivery timelines, and operational impact.

• Influence funding, prioritization, and sequencing decisions through credible and data-backed technical analysis.

Reliability & Operational Readiness

• Evaluate post-migration operating models, including observability, resiliency, automation, incident response, and overall SRE maturity.

• Ensure reliability objectives are realistically reflected in AWS architecture designs and service selection.

• Advocate for pragmatic reliability investments aligned with application criticality and business value.

Cross-Organizational Influence

• Partner with product, platform, security, finance, and portfolio leadership to drive aligned and scalable migration decisions.

• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers on systems thinking, dependency analysis, and business-aware SRE practices.

• Represent the SRE perspective in architecture review boards, migration governance forums, and executive-level discussions.

Required Skills & Experience Technical Experience

• 8+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure, or cloud architecture roles, operating at a Staff or equivalent level.

• Proven experience leading or assessing large-scale, enterprise on-premises to AWS migrations.

• Deep expertise in:

  • Distributed systems and multi-tier application architectures

  • On-prem infrastructure (compute, storage, networking, virtualization)

  • AWS services, architectures, design patterns, and tradeoffs at scale

• Strong ability to reason about application dependencies, failure domains, and systemic risk.

Strategic & Business Acumen

• Demonstrated ability to influence architectural and migration decisions at scale without direct authority.

• Comfortable challenging plans and priorities in a constructive, executive-ready manner.

• Strong analytical skills with experience evaluating cost models, delivery risk, and operational tradeoffs.

• Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to translate complex technical concepts into business terms.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience operating as a Staff or Principal Engineer in a matrixed enterprise organization.

• Familiarity with the AWS Well-Architected Framework, AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF), and structured migration methodologies.

• Exposure to FinOps or cloud financial management practices.

• Experience defining standards, review processes, or governance models for cloud migration at scale.

• Background working with regulated, mission-critical, or highly available enterprise systems.