Lead Principal Site Reliability Engineer - (work in Vienna VA location)

Key Responsibilities

• Maintain high availability, reliability, and performance of enterprise applications and cloud infrastructure.
• Design and implement automation to reduce manual operational effort and improve deployment consistency.
• Develop Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform and automation scripts using Python, Bash, or similar languages.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines to support automated deployments and release management.
• Monitor applications and infrastructure using observability platforms, including metrics, logs, traces, and alerting.
• Define and maintain Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and error budgets.
• Participate in on-call rotations and respond to production incidents with urgency and professionalism.
• Conduct root cause analysis (RCA) and implement corrective and preventive actions to eliminate recurring issues.
• Perform capacity planning, performance tuning, and scalability assessments.
• Support Kubernetes clusters, containerized workloads, and cloud-native applications.
• Collaborate with development teams to improve application resiliency, fault tolerance, and operational readiness.
• Partner with security teams to ensure systems comply with enterprise security and regulatory requirements.
• Create operational runbooks, documentation, and standard operating procedures.
• Continuously improve platform reliability through automation, monitoring, and operational best practices.
• Takes full ownership of forecasting infrastructure demands and strategically responds to capacity needs, ensuring systems have sufficient resources to handle current and future workloads, anticipating resource gaps.
• Seeks opportunities for prototyping and encourages the implementation of prototyping initiatives (e.g., testing new applications or infrastructures, assisting in onboarding), driving new approaches.
• Identifies and projects resource gaps using cost calculators, identifying alternative solutions to lower costs, when necessary.
• Provides guidance to others when monitoring services, maintains up-to-date knowledge of their performance, and meticulously documents their condition.
• Oversees root cause analyses for incidents and/or maintenance on assigned services (e.g., software installs, version upgrades, security updates, backup and recovery), ensuring efficient execution and preventing incident reoccurrence.
• Provides strategic, future-oriented health and performance reporting, and anticipates actions needed based on trends in data.
• Provides expert-level release notes, communication, and/or guidance on the scale, capacity, security, performance attributes, and requirements of services and technology to customers, cross-functional teams, leadership, and external stakeholders.
• Provides leadership in the on-call shifts.
•  Leads the resolution of multifaceted technical issues spanning multiple services, functions, and customers, collaborating with cross-functional teams and leveraging advanced investigation and debugging techniques to ensure the achievement of SLOs (service level objectives).
• Provides input on strategic initiatives to address opportunities to improve performance bottlenecks and deployments, maximizing resource utilization, cost efficiency, speed, and scalability across their line of business.
• Provides expertise in site reliability trends, guiding the creation and sharing of insights and best practices to shape the future of building, testing, deploying, and running services.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, Cloud Engineering, or Systems Engineering.
• Experience supporting production environments with strict availability requirements.
• Hands-on experience with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) or another major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and container orchestration platforms.
• Proficiency in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred).
• Experience with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Azure DevOps.
• Strong scripting skills in Python, Bash, or PowerShell.
• Experience with Linux system administration.
• Strong understanding of networking concepts including DRG, DNS, load balancing, routing, APIs, and Endpoints.
• Experience with Observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, Splunk, Datadog, New Relic, or OCI Native Observability services.
• Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills.
• Experience supporting financial services or other highly regulated industries.
• Knowledge of disaster recovery, backup strategies, and business continuity.

Desired Skills

• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
• Kubernetes
• Docker
• Terraform
• Python
• Bash
• Linux Administration
• CI/CD Pipelines
• Git
• Monitoring & Observability
• Incident Management
• Root Cause Analysis (RCA)
• Automation
• Capacity Planning
• Performance Tuning
• Networking
• Cloud Security
• High Availability
• Disaster Recovery
• DevOps
• Agile Methodologies

Success Measures

• Achieve and maintain service availability and reliability targets.
• Reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to recover (MTTR).
• Increase deployment frequency while minimizing change failure rates.
• Reduce operational toil through automation and self-service capabilities.
• Improve platform observability and proactive issue detection.
• Meet defined SLOs and error budget objectives.
• Deliver resilient, secure, and scalable cloud platforms that support client's critical business services.

This role is ideal for an engineer who is passionate about automation, operational excellence, and building highly reliable cloud platforms. The successful candidate will play a key role in ensuring client's production environments remain secure, resilient, and capable of supporting mission-critical financial services at scale.

#LI-JC1