Cloud Resilience Expert

As a seasoned Senior Site Reliability Engineer, you will be responsible for ensuring the high availability and performance of our SaaS on Azure.

You will define and enforce reliability standards, lead strategic projects, mentor engineers, and eliminate operational inefficiencies at scale. You will report to the Director of Engineering.

• Define Customer-Centric Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for Tier-0/Tier-1 services, publish, review quarterly, and align teams to them.
• Implement an error-budget policy with multi-window, multi-burn-rate alerts; develop clear runbooks and paging thresholds.
• Develop automated change gateways by budget status (freeze/relax rules) wired into Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD).
• Maintain SLI/SLO dashboards (Azure Monitor, Grafana/Prometheus, App Insights). Conduct weekly SLI reviews with engineering/product teams.
• Drive roadmap tradeoffs when budgets are at risk; deliver reliability epics.
• Respond to incidents without drama: Lead Severity 1/Severity 2 incidents, own communications, conduct blameless postmortems, and implement corrective actions.
• Engineer reliability in cloud-based systems: Implement Multi-AZ/region patterns (active-active/Disaster Recovery), Pod Topology Spread, Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA)/Vertical Pod Autoscaling (VPA)/Kubernetes Event Driven Autoscaling (KEDA), resilient rollout/rollback.
• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) scalability: Harden clusters (network, identity, policy), optimize node/pod density, ingress (Application Gateway Ingress Controller/Nginx); mesh optional.
• Observability that works: Implement Metrics/traces/logs with Azure Monitor/App Insights, Log Analytics, Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry. Alert on symptoms, not noise.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) & automation: Terraform/Bicep modules, GitOps (Flux/Argo), policy-as-code (Azure Policy/Open Policy Agent Gatekeeper). No manual snowflakes.
• CI/CD reliability: Azure DevOps/GitHub Actions with canary/blue-green, progressive delivery, auto-rollback, Key Vault-backed secrets.
• Capacity & performance: Conduct load testing, right-sizing, autoscaling; partner with FinOps to reduce spend without hurting SLIs/SLOs.
• Disaster Recovery you can trust: Define Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), test backups/restore, conduct game days/chaos drills, validate Azure Site Recovery and multi-region failover.
• Secure by default: Entra ID (Azure Active Directory), managed identities, Key Vault rotation, Virtual Networks/Subnets/Private Link, shift-left checks in CI.
• Reduce operational overhead: Automate recurring operations, build self-service runbooks/chatops, publish golden paths for product teams.
• Customer escalations: Be the technical owner on calls; communicate tradeoffs and recovery plans with authority.
• Document to scale: Architectures, runbooks, postmortems, SLIs/SLOs—kept current and discoverable.

Qualifications include a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Engineering (or equivalent experience) and 12+ years of experience in production operations/platform/SRE, including 5+ years on Azure.

PostgreSQL expertise is required, with deep operational knowledge including High Availability (HA)/Disaster Recovery (DR), logical/physical replication, performance tuning, autovacuum strategy, partitioning, backup/restore testing, and connection pooling.

Azure core skills are also required, including AKS, Front Door/Application Gateway, API Management, Virtual Networks/Subnets/Private Link, Storage, Key Vault, Redis, Service Bus/Event Hubs.

Observability, IaC/automation, and incident leadership skills are also essential.