Experienced Cloud Reliability Engineer

**About the Role:**

We're looking for a seasoned Reliability Expert to take ownership of our cloud infrastructure's performance, efficiency, and availability.

The ideal candidate will define and implement reliability standards, lead high-impact projects, mentor engineers, and streamline operations to reduce toil.

This is an exciting opportunity to work at the forefront of cloud reliability and make a significant impact on our organization's success.

1. Service Level Agreements (SLAs): Develop and maintain customer-centric SLAs for critical services, ensuring alignment across teams.
2. Error Budgeting: Establish and manage error budgets, implementing multi-window alerts, clear runbooks, and secure CI/CD gating.
3. SLO/EB Dashboards: Design and maintain comprehensive dashboards in Azure Monitor, Grafana/Prometheus, and App Insights for SLO reviews with engineering/product teams.
4. Roadmap Tradeoffs: Drive informed decision-making during budget risk situations by landing reliability epics.
5. Incident Management: Lead SEV1/SEV2 incidents, own communications, conduct blameless postmortems, and ensure corrective actions are implemented.
6. Cloud Reliability Engineering: Implement multi-AZ/region patterns, PDBs/Pod Topology Spread, HPA/VPA/KEDA, and resilient rollouts/rollbacks.
7. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Optimization: Harden clusters, optimize node/pod density, and enhance ingress security.
8. Observability: Implement metrics/traces/logs with Azure Monitor/App Insights, Log Analytics, Prometheus/Grafana, and OpenTelemetry, focusing on symptom-based alerting.
9. Infra as Code (IaC)/Automation: Leverage Terraform/Bicep modules, GitOps (Flux/Argo), and policy-as-code (Azure Policy/OPA Gatekeeper) for secure and scalable infrastructure management.
10. CI/CD Reliability: Ensure reliable pipelines in Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions, incorporating canary/blue-green deployments, progressive delivery, auto-rollback, and Key Vault-backed secrets.
11. Capacity/Performance Optimization:
12. Data Protection: Define RTO/RPO, test backups/restore, conduct game days/chaos drills, and validate ASR and multi-region failover.
13. Security: Implement Entra ID (Azure AD), managed identities, Key Vault rotation, VNets/NSGs/Private Link, and shift-left checks in CI for secure by default practices.
14. Toil Reduction: Automate recurring operations, build self-service runbooks/chatops, and publish golden paths for product teams.
15. Customer Escalations: Serve as technical owner on calls, communicating tradeoffs and recovery plans with authority.
16. Documentation: Maintain up-to-date architectures, runbooks, postmortems, and SLIs/SLOs to support scalability and knowledge sharing.

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Engineering or equivalent experience.
• 12+ years of production ops/platform/SRE experience, including 5+ years on Azure.
• PostgreSQL: Deep operational expertise in HA/DR, logical/physical replication, performance tuning, autovacuum strategy, partitioning, backup/restore testing, and connection pooling.
• Azure core: AKS (must-have); Front Door/App Gateway, API Management, VNets/NSGs/Private Link, Storage, Key Vault, Redis, Service Bus/Event Hubs.
• Observability: Azure Monitor/App Insights, Log Analytics, Prometheus/Grafana; SLO design and error-budget operations.
• IaC/automation: Terraform and/or Bicep; PowerShell and Python; GitOps (Flux/Argo). Pipelines in Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions.
• Proven incident leadership at scale, blameless postmortems, and SLO/error-budget governance with change gating.
• Mentorship and crisp written/verbal communication.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Apollo NiFi, Flink, Kafka or Redpanda (self-managed on AKS or managed equivalents); schema management, exactly-once semantics, backpressure, dead-letter/replay patterns.
• Azure Solutions Architect Expert, CKA/CKAD.
• ITSM (ServiceNow), on-call tooling (PagerDuty/Opsgenie).
• Compliance/SecOps (SOC 2, ISO 27001), policy-as-code, workload identity.
• OpenTelemetry, eBPF tooling, or service mesh.
• Multi-tenant SaaS and cost optimization at scale.